GOLDMAN, EMMA

Emma Goldman was a crusader for anarchism, feminism, and the labor movement. She was also an essayist and is best known as the first editor of Mother Earth, a magazine providing a forum for feminist and anarchist writers.

Goldman was born June 27, 1869, in Kaunas, Lithuania, a province of the Russian Empire, during the early stages of revolt against czarism and the rise in popularity of communism. The seeds of the Bolshevik revolt were already being sown in the towns and villages throughout the country where discontent with czarist rule was strongest. Goldman, who described herself as a born rebel, came into the world as the third daughter of Abraham Goldman and Taube Goldman. Her parents' marriage, like many Jewish Orthodox unions of the time, had been arranged.

Goldman suffered the fate of being a female in a culture that valued males. When she was young, her father made no effort to disguise his disappointment at having still another daughter instead of the much-prized son he hoped for. He has been described as hot tempered and impatient, particularly with Goldman's rebelliousness, which she showed at an early age. He was a traditional Jewish father, and he planned to arrange a marriage for his daughter when she was 15. Goldman, however, had different ideas: she longed for an education and hoped someday

to marry someone she loved. Goldman described her mother as cold and distant, but also strong and assertive, and she may have served as a role model for Goldman's own forthright manner.

After spending her childhood in Kaunas, Königsberg, and St. Petersburg, Goldman emigrated to the United States in 1885 with a sister. They joined another sister who had settled in Rochester, New York, where Goldman found work in a coat factory, sewing ten-and-a-half hours daily at a salary of $2.50 a week. She lived in a crowded apartment with her two sisters and her brother-in-law. Their working and living conditions, as well as those of others even more destitute, sparked her interest in anarchism and the labor movement, which was in its infancy.

She joined radical groups agitating for an eight-hour workday and other improvements in factory conditions.

Goldman was intensely interested in the Haymarket Square incident in Chicago in 1886. A labor rally called by a small group of anarchists was interrupted by a bomb explosion and gunfire. When it was over, seven police officers and four spectators were dead and one hundred were injured. Eight anarchists were tried and convicted of inciting a riot. Four of the convicted were hanged, one committed suicide in prison, and the other three served prison sentences. Spurred by her outrage at this alleged injustice, Goldman began attending anarchist meetings and reading the militant anarchist newspaper Die Freiheit (Freedom). She felt herself irresistibly drawn to the movement, and in the summer of 1889, at the age of 20, she moved to New York City to be near the center of anarchist activity.

After arriving in New York, Goldman befriended Johann J. Most, a well-known anarchist and publisher of Die Freiheit. She also met Alexander Berkman, who became her lover and with whom she remained close throughout her life. By this time, she was known as Red Emma, and she was followed by detectives wherever she went. She wrote, traveled, and lectured to promote anarchism and the labor movement. In 1893, she was briefly jailed for inciting workers to riot. After her release from jail, she traveled to Vienna to train as a nurse and midwife. She then returned to New York and resumed her lecturing. In 1901, she was accused of provoking the assassination of President william mckinley, because the assassin had attended one of her lectures. No charges were ever brought against her, but newspapers throughout the United States portrayed her as an evil traitor because of her controversial ideas.

In 1906, Goldman published the first issue of a magazine that was to serve as a platform for feminist and anarchist ideas. She called her venture Mother Earth, and within six months, it became a leading voice for feminism and anarchism. With Berkman, Goldman published the magazine until 1917, while she continued to travel, write, and lecture. During this time, she carried on an eight-year relationship with Ben Reitman, Chicago's King of the Hobos, a wellknown anarchist and labor activist who became her manager. Goldman had long since given up her idealistic notions about marriage. She had been married twice to the same man, both times with disastrous results, and had carried on a number of love affairs. Goldman preferred the impermanence and freedom of short-term affairs and wrote in more than one essay that marriage was women's greatest enemy because it robbed them of their independence.

The entry of the United States into world war i in 1917 precipitated a wave of hostility toward leftists, pacifists, anarchists, and foreigners. Legislation such as the Selective Service Act, the Espionage Act, and the Sedition Act were passed during 1917 and 1918 in order to suppress opposition to the war or the draft and to restrict certain civil liberties. Heedless of the repressive mood of the country, Goldman and Berkman, along with Leonard D. Abbott and Eleanor Fitzgerald, organized the No-Conscription League to oppose "all wars by capitalist governments." In the June 1917 issue of Mother Earth, they declared,"We will resist conscription by every means in our power, and we will sustain those who … refuse to be conscripted." As a result of their antiwar activities, Goldman and Berkman were arrested and charged with conspiring to prevent draft registration. They were tried and convicted and each received the maximum sentence of two years in prison and $10,000 in fines. In December 1919, in the wake of a red scare that led to the arrest and deportation of hundreds of leftists, anarchists, and labor organizers, Goldman and Berkman were deported to Russia.

Goldman was optimistic about resuming life in Russia now that the czar had been toppled by the Bolsheviks, but her hopes quickly dissipated as the realities of the new government became apparent. In her opinion,"the old cruel regime … had simply been replaced by a new, equally cruel one." She and Berkman left Russia in 1921 and eventually went to Germany. During their years in Germany, Goldman lectured and wrote a book, My Disillusionment in Russia (1923), detailing her disillusionment with Bolshevik rule.

"All wars are wars among thieves who are too cowardly to fight and who therefore induce the young manhood of the whole world to do the fighting for them."
—Emma Goldman

In 1924, Goldman moved to England, but she longed to return to the United States. Accepting an offer of marriage to James Colton, a staunch Scottish anarchist she had known for many years, provided her with an opportunity for British citizenship and the possibility of obtaining a British passport. She hoped to make her way to Canada and somehow gain entry into the United States. During the 1920s and 1930s, she traveled through Europe, writing and lecturing, and in 1931, she published her autobiography, Living My Life.

Goldman's wish to return to the United States was granted for a brief 90-day lecture tour in 1934, after which she returned to Europe. In 1940, while on a trip to Canada to enlist support for the anti-Franco forces in Spain, Goldman suffered a stroke. She died several months later, on May 14, 1940, in Toronto. Her body was allowed to be returned to the United States for burial in Chicago near the graves of other anarchists she admired.

further readings

The Emma Goldman Papers. Berkeley Digital Library. Available online at <sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman> (accessed June 27, 2003).

Falk, Candace, ed. 2003. Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

Forster, Margaret. 1985. Significant Sisters: The Grassroots of Active Feminism 1839–1939. New York: Knopf.

Goldman, Emma. 1982. Living My Life. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books.

Wexler, Alice. 1984. Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life. New York: Pantheon Books.

cross-references

Haymarket Riot.

Emma Goldman

The career of the Lithuanian-born anarchist Emma Goldman (1869-1940) drew attention to American problems in civil liberties at the turn of the century.

Emma Goldman was born on June 27, 1869, in Kovno of Jewish parents. She emigrated to the United States in 1885 and worked in clothing factories in Rochester, N.Y. In 1887 she married, quickly divorced, remarried, and finally separated. Inspired by the libertarian writings of Johann Most, she moved in 1889 to New York City. An attractive and intellectual woman, 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 her 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). Mature, bespectacled, but still attractive and magnetic in personality, she spoke on drama and literature, as well as on issues of the day. 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. She 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. She died in Toronto, in 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.

Further Reading

Emma Goldman is represented in Charles Hurd, ed., A Treasury of Great American Speeches (1959). Her career is fully reviewed in Richard Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman (1961). Eunice Minette Schuster, Native American Anarchism (1932), helps place her in perspective.

Additional Sources

Chalberg, John, Emma Goldman: American individualist, New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1991.

Drinnon, Richard, Rebel in paradise: a biography of Emma Goldman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 1961.

Falk, Candace, Love, anarchy, and Emma Goldman, New Brunswick N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

Ganguli, Birendranath, Emma Goldman: portrait of a rebel woman, New Delhi: Allied, 1979.

Goldman, Emma, Living my life: an autobiography of Emma Goldma, Salt Lake City, Utah: G.M. Smith, 1982.

Goldman, Emma, A woman without a country, Sanday Scot.: Cienfuegos Press, 1979.

Morton, Marian J., Emma Goldman and the American left: "Nowhere at home", New York, N.Y.: Twayne Publishers, 1992.

Solomon, Martha, Emma Goldman, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987.

Wexler, Alice, Emma Goldman in America, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.

Wexler, Alice, Emma Goldman in exile: from the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. □

Goldman, Emma (1869–1940), anarchist, social activist, free‐speech advocate, spokesperson for women's freedom.Born in a Jewish ghetto in present‐day Lithuania, Goldman moved with her family to Prussia and in 1881 to St. Petersburg, Russia. Fleeing provincialism and anti‐Semitism, she migrated to the United States in 1885 with a half‐sister, and settled in Rochester, New York, where she worked in a clothing factory. Her marriage to Jacob Kersner in 1887 ended in divorce. The Haymarket affair, coupled with harsh industrial conditions and violence against striking workers by government and business propelled her toward anarchism and support of the eight‐hour‐day movement. Moving to New York City in 1889, she encountered such émigré radicals as Johann Most and Alexander Berkman. Goldman's involvement with Berkman's attempted assassination of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick and her alleged link to the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley (by an anarchist who claimed to have been inspired by her speeches) resulted in her public demonization by the press.

She reclaimed her voice in 1906 by founding a literary and political magazine, Mother Earth, and through her lively cross‐country tours lecturing on anarchism, feminism, sexual radicalism, birth control, and new literary trends, especially modern drama. Liberals and radicals formed free‐speech clubs to protest the suppression of Goldman's talks and Roger Baldwin attributed his founding of the American Civil Liberties Union to Goldman. Goldman had been a mentor to Margaret Sanger and in 1916 was arrested for advocating birth control. Along with Berkman, she was tried, convicted, and imprisoned in 1917 for protesting wartime conscription, and in 1919, amid the post–World War I Red Scare, she and Berkman were deported with several hundred other alien radicals to Russia. In My Disillusionment in Russia (1923, full text 1925), she exposed the hypocrisy of Russia's Bolshevik regime and protested its suppression of dissent. Criticized and isolated by the Left and the Right, Goldman found refuge in southern France while frequently visiting England and Canada. Her compelling biography, My Life (1931), precipitated a final visit to the United States in 1934. Bereaved by the suicide of Berkman, her longtime comrade, in 1936, Goldman plunged into propaganda work for the Spanish anarchists during the Spanish Civil War, basing herself in London and Barcelona (1936–1938). She died in Canada, championing the cause of Spanish refugees and maintaining her lifelong commitment to free expression.
See also Birth Control and Family Planning; Gilded Age; Homestead Lockout; Labor Movements; Progressive Era; Radicalism; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Alice Wexler , Emma Goldman in America, 1984.
Candace Falk et al., eds., The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition, 69 reels, 1991.
Candace Falk et al., eds., Emma Goldman: A Guide to Her Life and Documentary Sources, 1995.

Candace Falk

GOLDMAN, EMMA 1869-1940

Freethinker, anarchist, social critic

Anarchist Background

Emma Goldman was born in Kovno, Russia; she immigrated to the United States in 1885. After working in Rochester, New York, for a few months, she moved to New Haven, Connecticut. There she became acquainted with political radicals, and she was deeply impressed by the anarchists involved in the 1886 Chicago Haymarket Square bombing. By 1889 Goldman was a confirmed anarchist, and she moved to New York City at a time, as she recalled in her memoirs, when her "entire possessions consisted of five dollars and a small handbag." In partnership with another Russian immigrant, Alexander Berkman, whom she called Sasha, Goldman helped plan the attempted assassination in 1892 of Henry Clay Frick, an associate of Andrew Carnegie whom labor activists held responsible for a pitched battle between striking steelworkers and Pinkerton detectives at Home-stead, Pennsylvania. For her role in the failed attempt she served a year in jail. By 1901 Goldman had a reputation as a violent political revolutionary. When President William McKinley was assassinated, Goldman was implicated when the gunman, Leon Czolgosz, told police that he had been inspired by Goldman.

Social Views

Goldman's anarchism was part of a broad critique of American society, and her views on sex, marriage, and family life were every bit as controversial as her political beliefs. In 1906 she began to edit the journal Mother Earth, in which she proclaimed her desire to abolish all government, and with it the oppressive Victorian restrictions on personal freedom. Goldman was an early advocate of birth control, which in the 1900s one could not discuss in print without being censored. She hated the institution of marriage, saying that it enslaved women, and she encouraged women to express themselves freely sexually. An effective and frequent public speaker, Goldman routinely scandalized America during the 1900s. In 1917 she was arrested for interfering with the military draft, and after two years in prison she was deported to Russia. She disliked the Soviet Union and spent the rest of her life living in several countries.

Source:

Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1931).

Emma Goldman 1869–1940, American anarchist, b. Lithuania. She emigrated to Rochester, N.Y., in 1886 and worked there in clothing factories. After 1889 she was active in the anarchist movement, and her speeches attracted attention throughout the United States. In 1893, Goldman was imprisoned for inciting to riot. From 1906 she was associated with Alexander Berkman in publishing the anarchist paper Mother Earth. In 1916 she was imprisoned for publicly advocating birth control, and in 1917 for obstructing the draft. With Berkman, Goldman was deported in 1919 to Russia but left that country in 1921 because of her disagreement with the Bolshevik government. In 1926 she married James Colton, a Welshman. She was permitted to reenter the United States for a lecture tour in 1934 on condition that she refrain from public discussion of politics. She took an active part in the Spanish civil war in 1936. She died in Toronto.

Bibliography: See her Living My Life (1931). Other writings include Anarchism and Other Essays (1911), Social Significance of Modern Drama (1914), and My Disillusionment in Russia (1923). See biographies by R. Drinnon (1961), A. Shulman (1971), and V. Gornick (2011).

Goldman, Emma (1869–1940), Russian‐born exponent of anarchism⧫, came to the U.S. (1886) and soon began to write and lecture in behalf of various reform movements, including feminism and birth control. Her anarchist speeches, and the magazine Mother Earth, which she founded in 1906, attracted wide attention. She was twice jailed, once for advocating pacifism during World War I. In 1919 she and an associate, Alexander Berkman, were deported to Russia, but their dislike for the Bolshevist regime and their criticism of it led to their leaving the country. Miss Goldman's autobiography, Living My Life (1931), was published from her home in France, and her other works include Anarchism and Other Essays (revised edition, 1911), The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914), and My Disillusionment in Russia (1925).