Emma Goldman

Origins and family

Emma Goldman was born on June 27, 1869, in Kaunas (then Kovno), in present-day Lithuania, which was part of the Russian Empire. She came from an Orthodox Jewish family. Her mother, Taube Bienowitch, had been widowed from a first marriage that produced two daughters, Helena and Lena, and her second marriage, arranged by her family, was unhappy. Her father, Abraham Goldman, sank Taube's inheritance into a business that quickly failed, and the household became tense and hard. Emma was the eldest child of this second marriage, followed by Louis, Herman and Moishe. Her father punished the children violently, and Emma, the most rebellious, received many beatings from him.

Childhood and youth in Russia

The family moved to Papilė, where the father ran an inn, and later to Königsberg, then in the German Empire, where Emma attended a Realschule. There she suffered arbitrary punishments and found a mentor in a German-language teacher who lent her books. When the family settled in Saint Petersburg, poverty forced the children to work, and Emma took various jobs, including one in a corset shop. Her father withdrew her from school and scolded her for learning too much, while she educated herself and followed the political turmoil, particularly the Nihilists who had assassinated Alexander II. Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? gave her a model of an independent woman that stayed with her for life. Her father intended to marry her off at fifteen, and an assault she suffered from a man in a hotel room shaped her view of relations between the sexes.

Arrival in the United States and early activism

In 1885, with Helena's help, Emma emigrated to the United States and settled in Rochester, New York, where Lena lived with her husband. She worked as a seamstress in harsh conditions. There she married Jacob Kershner, a fellow worker, in 1887, but the marriage soon failed, partly because of his impotence and jealousy. After the hanging of the Haymarket anarchists in Chicago, Goldman turned toward anarchism. In New York she met Johann Most, editor of the newspaper Freiheit and advocate of "propaganda of the deed", who trained her as a public speaker, and Alexander Berkman, with whom she shared a romantic relationship and a friendship that lasted decades.

The Frick attempt and prison

In 1892, during the Homestead Strike, Berkman and Goldman planned the assassination of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, who had overseen the suppression of striking workers by Pinkerton agents. Berkman carried out the attack on July 23, but Frick survived, and Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Goldman was regarded as a moral accomplice, and the attack failed to win the popular support they had hoped for; even Most publicly attacked her, and she struck him with a whip during a lecture. After the Panic of 1893 and a large demonstration in Union Square, she was charged with "inciting to riot". The phrase attributed to her speech, ask for work, then for bread, and then take the bread, has different versions depending on who recalled it. She was sentenced to a year in the Blackwell's Island Penitentiary, where she worked as a nurse and read widely.

Lectures, medicine and birth control

After her release she toured Europe giving lectures, where she met Errico Malatesta, Louise Michel and Peter Kropotkin, and obtained midwifery diplomas in Vienna, which she later practiced in the United States. In 1906 she founded the magazine Mother Earth, which she edited for years and in which she published writers from across the radical spectrum. Her relationship with Ben Reitman, a physician nicknamed the "hobo doctor", lasted from 1908 to 1917. Goldman defended birth control and sexual freedom, and was arrested in 1916 for distributing contraceptive material and lecturing on the subject under the Comstock Law. Her book Anarchism and Other Essays gathered much of her thinking from those years.

War, deportation and Russia

After the United States entered the First World War, Goldman and Berkman opposed military conscription and organized the No-Conscription League. In 1917 they were sentenced to two years in prison for conspiracy, and in 1919, during the Red Scare, they were deported to Russia along with hundreds of foreigners considered dangerous. J. Edgar Hoover described them as two of the most dangerous anarchists in the country. Goldman initially sympathized with the Bolshevik revolution, but the arrests, bureaucracy and repression, aggravated after the Kronstadt rebellion, led her to leave the country in 1921. Her books My Disillusionment in Russia and its sequel made her a prominent critic of the Soviet regime.

Exile, autobiography and the Spanish Civil War

After years in Berlin, London, Canada and France, Goldman wrote her autobiography, Living My Life, published in two volumes in 1931 and 1935. Berkman took his own life in 1936 in Nice after a serious illness, and she was deeply affected. That same year she travelled to Spain, where the anarcho-syndicalist movement had driven the revolution in Catalonia and Aragon. There she felt, for the first time, part of a community organized on anarchist principles, and she wrote the article Durruti Is Dead, Yet Living in tribute to the CNT-FAI leader. She died in Toronto on May 14, 1940, after a second stroke.

Thought, feminism and legacy

Goldman never aligned herself with a single current of anarchism, and her biographers point to a lasting tension between collectivist and individualist values. She criticized suffragism, which she regarded as a "political fetish", and distanced herself from first-wave feminism, though she defended equality between men and women and sexual and emotional freedom, influenced by Freud and Havelock Ellis. She is considered a forerunner of anarcha-feminism, and she defended the rights of gay men and lesbians at a time when they were almost absent from anarchist discourse. She fell into obscurity for decades, but in the 1970s she regained near-iconic status thanks to renewed interest from feminist and anarchist scholars. Her life was portrayed by Maureen Stapleton in Reds (1981) and was the subject of a play by Howard Zinn.