Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 – May 14, 1940) was a writer, political activist, and anarchist revolutionary born in Russia. She was instrumental in shaping anarchist political thought across North America and Europe during the early 1900s. Goldman was born to a Lithuanian Jewish family in Kaunas, Lithuania—then part of the Russian Empire—and moved to the United States in 1885. The Haymarket affair in Chicago drew her to anarchism, and she went on to become a well-known lecturer and writer on anarchism, women's rights, and social issues, often speaking to crowds of thousands.

Along with fellow anarchist and lifelong companion Alexander Berkman, Goldman plotted to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892 as a form of propaganda by deed. Frick survived, and Berkman received a 22-year prison sentence. Over the following years, Goldman was jailed multiple times for inciting riots and for distributing illegal information about birth control. In 1906, she launched the anarchist journal *Mother Earth*.

In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in prison for conspiring to encourage people to avoid registering for the draft. After their release, they were among 249 people arrested during the Palmer Raids of the First Red Scare and deported to Russia in December 1919. Initially supportive of the Bolsheviks' October Revolution, Goldman changed her stance after the Kronstadt rebellion, condemning the Soviet Union for violently suppressing independent voices. She left the country and in 1923 published *My Disillusionment in Russia*, a book about her experiences. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote her autobiography, *Living My Life*, released in two volumes in 1931 and 1935. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, she traveled to Spain to back the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto, Canada, in 1940 at age 70.

During her lifetime, Goldman was celebrated by fans as a free-thinking "rebel woman" and criticized by opponents as an advocate for political murder and violent revolution. Her lectures and writings covered prisons, atheism, free speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Though she kept her distance from first-wave feminism and the fight for women's suffrage, she introduced new ways of linking gender politics to anarchism. After decades of relative obscurity, Goldman became an iconic figure in the 1970s when feminist and anarchist scholars revived interest in her life.

**Biography**

**Family** Goldman was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. Her mother, Taube Bienowitch, had been married before and had two daughters—Helena (born 1860) and Lena (born 1862). After her first husband died of tuberculosis, Taube was devastated. Goldman later wrote that whatever love her mother had died with that young man. Taube's second marriage was arranged by her family and, as Goldman described it, was mismatched from the start. Her second husband, Abraham Goldman, used Taube's inheritance on a business that quickly failed. The resulting poverty and emotional distance between her parents made the household tense. When Taube became pregnant, Abraham desperately wanted a son, seeing a daughter as another sign of failure. They eventually had three sons, but their first child was Emma, born on June 27, 1869. Abraham punished his children with violence, beating them when they disobeyed, and used a whip on Emma, the most rebellious. Her mother offered little comfort and rarely asked Abraham to stop. Goldman later thought her father's furious temper was partly due to sexual frustration. Her relationships with her half-sisters differed: Helena provided the comfort the children lacked and filled Goldman's childhood with joy, while Lena was distant and uncharitable. The three sisters had brothers Louis (who died at age six), Herman (born 1872), and Moishe (born 1879).

**Adolescence** When Goldman was young, her family moved to the village of Papilė, where her father ran an inn. While her sisters worked, she befriended a servant named Petrushka, who stirred her "first erotic sensations." In Papilė, she saw a peasant whipped with a knout in the street, an event that traumatized her and fueled her lifelong opposition to violent authority. At age seven, she moved with her family to the Prussian city of Königsberg (then part of the German Empire) and enrolled in a Realschule. One teacher punished disobedient students—targeting Goldman in particular—by beating their hands with a ruler. Another teacher tried to molest female students and was fired after Goldman fought back. She found a sympathetic mentor in her German-language teacher, who lent her books and took her to the opera. A passionate student, she passed the exam for admission to a gymnasium, but her religion teacher refused to give her a certificate of good behavior, so she could not attend. The family then moved to Saint Petersburg, Russia, where her father opened one unsuccessful store after another. Poverty forced the children to work, and Goldman took a variety of jobs.