Emma Goldman was an anarchist political activist and writer.
Background
Emma Goldman was born on June 27, 1869, in Kovno (Kaunas) of Jewish parents. Her mother Taube Bienowitch and father Abraham Goldman had a very troubled relationship which greatly bothered the young girl. She had two half-sisters and three brothers. She had a loving relationship only with her elder half-sister Helena.
Education
Emma's father stopped her from going to school when she was a teenager and she took to independent education.
Career
Emma emigrated to the United States in 1885 and worked in clothing factories in Rochester, New York. Inspired by the libertarian writings of Johann Most, she moved in 1889 to New York City. She now began her long association with the Russian anarchist Alexander Berkman. Goldman's radical activities culminated in a plan with Berkman to commit an anarchist "deed" against Henry Frick, of the Carnegie Steel Company, who was resisting his employees' unionist efforts. Though she was not with Berkman when he shot and wounded Frick (and was sentenced to prison), she herself went to prison the following year in New York for allegedly urging the unemployed to take "by force" the food they required. Though Goldman ceased advocating violence, she continued defending those who did.
Upon Emma's release from prison, she became a nurse and a midwife. Trips to Europe in 1895 and 1899-1900 broadened her perspectives. She became notorious again in 1901 and suffered unwarranted harassment when the disturbed assassin of President William McKinley said her speeches had influenced him.
When Berkman came out of prison, he joined Goldman's publication Mother Earth (1906 - 1917). Her book The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914) was superficial; stronger and more varied was Anarchism and Other Essays (1910). Goldman gained new fame during the "youth movement" of radicals and social experimenters in the 1910s. Her battle for birth control information and related matters of special concern to women was notable. Charged with obstructing operation of the Conscription Act during World War I, she and Berkman were fined and sentenced in 1917 to 2 years' imprisonment. Long, recriminatory proceedings culminated in her being deprived of citizenship on technical grounds, and she was deported to Russia.
Emma Goldman had hailed the Russian Revolution, she found herself repelled by the Bolshevik dictatorship and left Russia. My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and My Further Disillusionment in Russia (1924) stirred world controversy. Emma married a Welsh miner to obtain British citizenship, and friends bought her a home in France.
Her distinguished autobiography Living My Life appeared in 1931. During the Spanish Civil War (1936) Goldman actively supported her anarchist comrades. Emma died in Toronto, Canada, on May 14, 1940. Though she had been barred from the United States (except for a 90-day visit in 1934), her body was permitted entry, and she was buried in Chicago.
A committed atheist, Goldman viewed religion as another instrument of control and domination. Her essay "The Philosophy of Atheism" quoted Bakunin at length on the subject.
Politics
Goldman, in her political youth, held targeted violence to be a legitimate means of revolutionary struggle. Goldman at the time believed that the use of violence, while distasteful, could be justified in relation to the social benefits it might accrue. She advocated propaganda of the deed - attentat, or violence carried out to encourage the masses to revolt.
Goldman believed that the economic system of capitalism was incompatible with human liberty.
Views
Goldman's anarchism was intensely personal. She believed it was necessary for anarchist thinkers to live their beliefs, demonstrating their convictions with every action and word. Anarchism and free association were to her logical responses to the confines of government control and capitalism. At the same time, she believed that the movement on behalf of human liberty must be staffed by liberated humans.
Quotations:
"Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion and liberation of the human body from the coercion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. It stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals."
"Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism... Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others."
"The most violent element in society is ignorance."
"I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood."
"People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take."
Personality
She was an intellectual, bespectacled, attractive and magnetic in personality.
Quotes from others about the person
As one her friend said: "Just to think that here was Emma, the greatest orator in America, unable to utter one word."
Connections
Emma married Jacob Kershner in 1887. However, the marriage was short-lived and they divorced within a year.
In 1925 Emma married a Scottish anarchist named James Colton. She had a lifelong relationship with anarchist Alexander Berkman with whom she often participated in anarchist and political activities.