Emma Goldman

Lore & Background

Emma Goldman was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Kaunas, Lithuania. Her father used violence to punish his children, and her mother provided scarce comfort. As a young girl, the family moved to the village of Papilė, where she witnessed a peasant being whipped with a knout, an event that contributed to her lifelong distaste for violent authority. At age seven, she moved with her family to Königsberg, then to Saint Petersburg, where poverty forced her to work. She pursued an independent education, reading Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel 'What Is to Be Done?' which remained a source of inspiration. In 1885, she immigrated to the United States with her sister Helena, settling in Rochester, New York, where she worked as a seamstress. She married Jacob Kershner in February 1887, but the relationship faltered.

Reader's Guide

Emma Goldman's significance lies in her pivotal role in developing anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe. She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman planned to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892 as an act of propaganda of the deed; Frick survived, and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times for inciting to riot and illegally distributing birth control information. In 1906, she founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth. In 1917, she and Berkman were sentenced to two years for conspiring to induce persons not to register for the draft. After release, they were arrested in the Palmer Raids and deported to Russia in December 1919. Initially supportive of the October Revolution, she changed her opinion after the Kronstadt rebellion and denounced the Soviet Union. She published 'My Disillusionment in Russia' in 1923 and an autobiography, 'Living My Life', in two volumes (1931 and 1935). After the Spanish Civil War broke out, she traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution. She died in Toronto in 1940. Her writing and lectures covered prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. She distanced herself from first-wave feminism but developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, she gained iconic status in the 1970s when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest.

Did You Know?

• Goldman was attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair in Chicago.
• She and Alexander Berkman planned to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892; Frick survived.
• Goldman was deported to Russia in December 1919 during the Palmer Raids.
• She published an autobiography, 'Living My Life', in two volumes in 1931 and 1935.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"The supreme effort of the avant-guard is onward, ever onward." — Emma Goldman "Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian." — Emma Goldman "I hope I shall never live to see Anarchism become thoroughly respectable, for then I shall have to look for a new ideal." — Emma Goldman "Letter to Helen Keller (1916), published by "The American Foundation for the Blind" — Emma Goldman