4 – Emma Goldman
“If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.” Emma Goldman
From Constance Markiewicz to Rosa Luxemburg to Sylvia Pankhurst, we have been gradually getting more and more radical in our women, and our next candidate might be the most radical yet. Emma Goldman is to the anarchist movement what Rosa Luxemburg is to the Communists: a theoretical titan, an activist heroine and an ideological powerhouse. She moved the anarchist current from one based around labour and economic issues and injected her own brand of feminism into it, talking about issues such as birth control, free love, homosexuality and intersectionality well before anyone else.
Emma Goldman was born into a Jewish family in 1869, in Kovno, now the Lithuanian city of Kaunus but then a part of the Tsar’s Russian Empire. Her father was violent and stumbled through a succession of poor businesses, leading the family to remain poor and to move around. He tried to stop Emma’s education and force her into a career of domestic service, but she refused to be limited to just that. He tried to marry her off to a succession of men, but she again defied him. Eventually, she emigrated to the United States at the age of 16.
The turning point in her life would come in 1886, when she heard of the Haymarket Affair in Chicago, where seven policemen were killed by a bomb, leading to the execution of four anarchists after a show trial. The subsequent red scare that followed moved Goldman to become involved in the anarchist movement, giving her first speech in New York City and meeting Alexander Berkman, a fellow anarchist who would become her life partner. She threw herself into campaigning, supporting striking workers and plotting assassination attempts against bosses.
Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison after the attempted murder of a steel company boss. Emma would soon follow him into jail, having been convicted of inciting unemployed workers to riot against their lack of work and bread. She was still just 24. She was released two years later and toured the world giving speeches in favour of anarchism, as well as working as a midwife to pay the bills. She undertook the first US tour by an anarchist speaker in 1898 and was at the height of her powers.
In 1901, that would all change. The President, William McKinley, was assassinated by Leon Czolgosz, who claimed to have been inspired by a speech that Goldman gave. The authorities arrested Goldman for planning the murder, despite Czolgosz being clearly mentally ill and having having been suspected by Goldman and her associates of being a spy. He was executed, but Goldman never condemned his actions, losing her the majority of her friends within the anarchist movement and mass denouncement from the mainstream media. She retired from public life for almost 5 years.
She returned by starting an anarchist magazine, Mother Earth, in 1906 and gradually started speaking again when Berkman was released from prison. In this later period, she began to have her theoretical impact: Her book, Anarchism and other Essays, featured chapters on free love, birth control, women’s suffrage and the fallacies of nationalism and patriotism, while her speeches were now predominantly aimed at women and furthered the idea of contraception for women. As the First World War continued in Europe and America joined in, she began campaigning against conscription and again found herself imprisoned for it, spending two years in jail for her actions.
Eventually, Goldman was deported back to Russia at the end of the war, but found the new Bolshevik government to be as repressive as any other state. Her and Berkman moved onto Latvia, then Berlin, London and finally Canada, where she published an autobiography. She later travelled to Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War – the high point of anarchism as an ideology – and agitated widely for the cause. She died in 1940 in Canada and was buried in Forest Park, Illinois.