Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman (Kaunas, Russian Empire, 1869 – Toronto, Canada, 1940) was an anarchist writer and activist of Jewish origin, born in the Russian Empire and based in the United States, who became one of the most influential voices of anarchism in North America and Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Her contemporaries called her “the most dangerous woman in America.” Her thinking belongs to the socialist strand of anarchism, and her lasting importance lies in linking the critique of state power with the questions of sexual freedom, women’s emancipation and birth control.

She grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household marked by the violence of her father, Abraham Goldman, who wanted to marry her off while she was still a teenager. After a bitter quarrel with him, she emigrated to the United States with her half-sister Helena and reached New York in late 1885. She worked as a seamstress in Rochester and married a fellow worker in 1887, a union that ended within months. The hanging of anarchists after the Haymarket affair in Chicago drew her towards the libertarian movement. In New York she met Alexander Berkman, and in 1892 the two planned an attack on the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, as a protest against the use of Pinkerton agents against striking workers. Frick survived, and Berkman was sentenced to prison. Goldman was jailed several times, for inciting to riot and for distributing information on birth control. In 1906 she founded the journal Mother Earth, which became her main platform for years.

Her ideas covered the state, religion, militarism, conventional marriage and the sexual morality of her time. She defended free love and women’s control over their own lives, but she was critical of the suffrage movement, which she saw as a political fetish that left deeper inequalities untouched. Her biographers point to a lasting tension in her work between collectivist and individualist values, which she never fully resolved. In 1917 she and Berkman were imprisoned for opposing conscription. In 1919 they were deported to Russia. She first welcomed the October Revolution, but political repression and bureaucracy turned her against the Bolshevik state, and after the Kronstadt rebellion she denounced its violence against independent voices. That experience produced My Disillusionment in Russia, and later her autobiography, Living My Life, published in two volumes in 1931 and 1935. During the Spanish Civil War she supported the Spanish anarchists and wrote a notable tribute to Buenaventura Durruti after his death.

Her reputation declined after her death, until the 1970s, when renewed interest from anarchist and feminist scholars restored her as a central figure in the history of libertarian ideas and the struggle for equality.