Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 – May 14, 1940) was a Lithuanian-born anarcho-communist known for her anarchist writings and speeches. Adopted by First-wave feminists, she has been lionized as an iconic "rebel woman" feminist. Goldman played a pivotal role in the development of anarchism in the US and Europe throughout the first half of the twentieth century. She immigrated to the United States at seventeen and was later deported to Russia, where she witnessed the results of the Russian Revolution. She spent a number of years in the South of France where she wrote her autobiography, Living My Life, and other works, before taking part in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 as the English language representative in London of the CNT-FAI.

Life

Birth and early years

Immigration to America

At the age of 17 she immigrated with her elder sister, Helene, to Rochester, New York, to live with their sister Lena. Goldman worked for several years in a textile factory, and in 1887 married fellow factory worker Jacob Kershner, gaining US citizenship. The hanging of four anarchists after the Haymarket Riot drew the young Emma Goldman to the anarchist movement, and at twenty she became a revolutionary. Following the uproar over the hanging, Goldman left her marriage and her family and traveled to New Haven, Connecticut, and then to New York City. Goldman and Kershner were divorced.

New York City

In New York City she met and lived with Alexander Berkman, who was an important figure of the anarchist movement in the United States at the time. Her defense of Berkman's attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick in July 1892 made her highly unpopular with the authorities. Berkman (or Sasha as she fondly referred to him) was jailed for fourteen years, and was released from prison in 1906.

She also became friends with Hippolyte Havel at this time.

Goldman traveled widely giving speeches on behalf of the libertarian socialist movement, often funded by the IWW.

Prison

She was imprisoned in 1893 at Blackwell's Island penitentiary for publicly urging unemployed workers that they should "Ask for work. If they do not give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, take bread." (The statement is a summary of the principle of expropriation advocated by anarchist communists like Peter Kropotkin.) She was convicted of "inciting a riot" by a criminal court of New York, despite the testimonies of twelve witnesses in her defense. The jury based their verdict on the testimony of one individual, a Detective Jacobs. Voltairine de Cleyre gave the lecture In Defense of Emma Goldman as a response to this imprisonment. While serving her one year sentence, Goldman developed a keen interest in nursing.

Conspiracy to assassinate the President

She was arrested in Chicago, with nine others, on September 10, 1901, on charges of conspiracy to assassinate President McKinley. Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, had shot the President several days before. The authorities arrested her and nine other anarchists, including Abe and Mary Isaak, for suspicion of conspiracy in a plot with Czolgosz. The assassination of McKinley stained the cause of Anarchism and discredited it in American popular opinion, making its association a slur. Consequently, causes which Anarchists had championed (such as the labor movement) sought afterward to disassociate themselves from self-identifying anarchists. Goldman had met Czolgosz, briefly, several weeks before, where he had asked Goldman's advice on a course of study in anarchist ideas. Goldman was released on September 24 after authorities were unable to connect her and the others directly to Czolgosz's crime. Leon Czolgosz was found guilty of murder and executed.

Mother Earth

In 1906 she published Mother Earth with Berkman, a monthly journal in which she covered current affairs from an anarcha-feminist perspective, and reprinted essays by anarchist writers as well as Tolstoy and Nietzsche, who were both major influences on her thinking. On the latter she said, "Nietzsche was not a social theorist, but a poet, a rebel, and innovator. His aristocracy was neither of birth nor of purse; it was the spirit. In that respect Nietzsche was an anarchist, and all true anarchists were aristocrats"'.

Birth control

On February 11, 1916, she was arrested and imprisoned again for her distribution of birth control literature. She, like many contemporary feminists, saw abortion as a tragic consequence of social conditions. In 1911, Goldman wrote in Mother Earth:

"The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief...So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies."

World War I

Her third imprisonment was in 1917, this time for conspiring to obstruct the draft: Berkman and Goldman were both involved in setting up No Conscription Leagues and organising rallies against World War I. She believed that militarism needed to be defeated to achieve freedom, writing in 'Anarchism and Other Essays'; "The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism. The very moment the latter is undermined, capitalism will totter." (illustration, right) She was imprisoned for two years, after which she was deported to Russia. At her deportation hearing, J. Edgar Hoover, directing the hearing, called her "one of the most dangerous anarchists in America."

Deportation

Her 1919 deportation, along with hundreds of other radicals rounded up in the Palmer Raids, meant that Goldman, with Berkman, was able to witness the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution first hand. On her arrival in Russia, she was prepared to support the Bolsheviks despite the split between anarchists and statist communists at the First International. But seeing the political repression and forced labour in Russia offended her anarchist sensibilities. In 1921, brutal repression by the Red Army (under the direct leadership of Leon Trotsky) against the striking and libertarian-minded Kronstadt sailors left Goldman and other anarchists keenly disillusioned with the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks, however, argued that in times of revolution, violence is required in order to depose the previous power holders. This led Goldman to write My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia. She was also devastated by the massive destruction and death resulting from the Russian Civil War, in which counter-revolutionary elements, aided by foreign governments such as the United States and Japan, attempted to throttle the young communist state before it could spread its subversive ideology to other lands. Goldman was friends with American communists John Reed and Louise Bryant, both of whom were also in Russia at this time when it was impossible to leave the country; they may even have shared an apartment (see also the film Reds).

After two years, she and Berkman left Russia. She stayed with old friends in England and France until Peggy Guggenheim raised funds for a cottage for Goldman in the French commune of Saint-Tropez on the Mediterranean Côte d'Azur. They called her house Bon esprit ("good spirit"). There she could write and receive correspondence, but was isolated.

Spanish Civil War

In 1936, Goldman went to Spain to support the Spanish Revolution and the fight against Francisco Franco's fascism, known as the Spanish Civil War. This fitted with her belief that freedom came from opposing oppression, as she wrote in 'Anarchism and Other Essays'; "Politically the human race would still be in the most absolute slavery were it not for the John Balls, the Wat Tylers, the Tells, the innumerable individual giants who fought inch by inch against the power of kings and tyrants." During this time she wrote the obituary of the prominent Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti in a piece of vibrant prose entitled Durruti is Dead, Yet Living, which echoes Percy Bysshe Shelley's Adonais.

Death and burial

Emma Goldman died of a stroke in Toronto on May 14, 1940. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service allowed her body to be brought back to the United States, and she was buried in German Waldheim Cemetery (now part of Forest Home Cemetery) in Forest Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, close to where the executed Haymarket Riot defendants are interred ^*. Her tombstone reads "Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to Liberty."

An urban legend in Toronto holds that Goldman's ghost haunts the union hall on Spadina Avenue, now a Chinese restaurant, where she often spoke and where her body was displayed after her death.

Emma Goldman in fiction

Emma Goldman is the subject of several fine art prints by Philadelphia artist Joseph Rose. The portfolio which features prints of Emma Goldman can be found at www.megahurt.net ^*
Emma Goldman's ten year relationship with Ben Reitman is dramatized in the stage play by Lynn Rogoff entitled, "Love, Ben Love, Emma". Rogoff, who received the blessing from both estates, has the letters read as monlogues at significant junctures in the [http://www.amerikids.com/theatre.htm play.
Emma Goldman appears as a fictional character in E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, where she plays an important part in allowing the characters of Evelyn Nesbit and her lover, Younger Brother, to examine their own lives in a new way. The book combines fiction with history. In the musical based on the book, Emma appears as a featured vocalist in two songs, "The Night That Goldman Spoke" and "He Wanted To Say."
Emmanuel Goldstein, a character in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, may refer to Emma Goldman.
The meeting between Emma Goldman and Leon Czolgosz is featured in Sondheim's Broadway musical Assassins.
Emma Goldman appears in the 1991 Origin Systems computer RPG Martian Dreams. In the game's alternate reality, Goldman is an ally of the Martian-possessed Grigori Rasputin.
Emma Goldman is played in the Warren Beatty film Reds by Maureen Stapleton, who won an Academy Award for the role.
Emma Goldman's life is the subject of Howard Zinn's play "Emma"
Emma Goldman and Leon Czolgosz appear in Rhys Bowen's "Death of Riley". While they are acknowledged to be true historical characters, the rest of the book is fiction.
Emma Goldman is the protagonist in an unpublished book called "Red Emma" by Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe. The book is illegal to publish in Norway, due to a conflict with the author's family.

Books written by Emma Goldman

Anarchism and Other Essays (ISBN 1599869896)
Living My Life (autobiography)
My Disillusionment in Russia
My Further Disillusionment in Russia
The Social Significance of the Modern Drama

References

Falk, Candace, et al. Emma Goldman: A Documentary History Of The American Years, Volume 1 - Made for America, 1890-1901. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. ISBN 0520086708
Falk, Candace, et al. Emma Goldman: A Documentary History Of The American Years, Volume 2 - Making Speech Free, 1902-1909. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. ISBN 0520225694
Goldman, Emma. The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation, New York, Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1906,
Goldman, Emma. My Disillusionment in Russia. London: C. W. Daniel Co., 1925. ISBN 048643270X
Goldman, Emma. Living My Life. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1931. ISBN 0486225437
Goldman, Emma. Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution, ed. David Porter. New Paltz, NY: Commonground Press, 1983. ISBN 0961034823
Moritz, Theresa. The World's Most Dangerous Woman: A New Biography of Emma Goldman. Vancouver: Subway Books, 2001. ISBN 0968716318
Avrich, Paul The Haymarket Tragedy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984.
Chalberg, John Emma Goldman: American Individualist, New York, Harper Collins Publishers Inc., 1991.
Falk, Candace Serena Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Goldman, Emma Anarchism and Other Essays, New York, Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910.
Goldman, Emma The Traffic in Women, and other essays on feminism, Albion CA, Times Change Press,1970.
Marsh, Margaret S. Anarchist Women 1870-1920, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1981.
Wexler, Alice Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life, New York, Pantheon Books, 1984.
Wexler, Alice Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War, Boston, Beacon Press, 1989.

External links

Emma Goldman Page Anarchist Encyclopedia

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Emma Goldman