Goldman, Emma

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GOLDMAN, Emma

Born 27 June 1869, Kovno, Russia; died 14 May 1940, Toronto, Canada

Daughter of Abraham and Taube Bienowitch Goldman; married Jacob Kersner, 1887; James Colton, 1926

Born to Jewish parents in Russian-dominated Lithuania, Emma Goldman was unwelcome to a father who made a precarious living as manager of the government stagecoach and later as an innkeeper. Her mother, whose first husband had died leaving two small daughters, had married Goldman out of economic need and was just as unhappy at the arrival of another child—especially of a female, when it was her husband's fervent wish to have a son. After several family moves and haphazard schooling in German and Russian, Goldman was taken to St. Petersburg, where at the age of thirteen she was forced by the family's poverty to work long exhausting hours in glove and corset factories. She nevertheless found time to read German, French, and Russian literature and to absorb the radical anticzarist ideas abroad in the Russian capital.

At seventeen she came to America, where an older married sister had settled in Rochester, New York. In the late 1880s she began to attain, as an active anarchist, a charismatic speaker, and a proficient writer and editor, the notoriety which increased until her deportation by federal authorities at the end of 1919. Although her name appeared less often in American newspapers after World War I, she continued her battles against injustice everywhere in the world: at the time of her death she was in Canada collecting funds for the Spanish Loyalists whose cause she espoused.

Throughout the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, Goldman flailed the society which knowingly espoused poverty and discrimination, and the state which exploited the laborer and turned women into minor citizens. She could be counted on to come to the defense of accused labor leaders and radicals, who were, in her opinion, usually unable to get a fair trial. In her lecture tours of the country, she spoke on such varied subjects as women's rights, birth control, political violence, the needs of labor, prejudice in the American courts, the somber condition of American prisons, the social significance of the Continental and British playwrights, and the failure of justice in America, where she had come, like so many others, with high hopes. These are also the subjects on which Goldman wrote hundreds of pamphlets and articles.

Goldman's little monthly publication, Mother Earth, which ran from 1906 to 1917, when it was confiscated by the police, was a "gadfly" that stung liberals into radical thinking and furnished a voice for anarchists from coast to coast. It was consequently subject to harassment by various officials of justice departments who believed in the kind of law and order that disregarded civil rights. Besides espousing the cause of women, it was so heretical as to satirize the great evangelist Billy Sunday and to castigate the puritanical Comstocks of America who interfered with personal freedom and looked at sex as obscene. Mother Earth, "devoted to social science and literature," also sought to encourage "the various art forms in America" by printing poetry, literary excerpts, and book reviews.

Goldman did much personally, as well, to bring knowledge of the contemporary unpublished foreign drama to Americans through many lectures, included in The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914). Her autobiography, Living My Life (1931), begins with what she considers the unjust execution of anarchists following the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1887 and continues through various instances of perversions of justice up to the Sacco-Vanzetti case in 1920. Writing of the denial of their appeal, she grieved: "It seemed impossible that the State of Massachusetts would repeat in 1923 the crime Illinois had committed in 1887."

Although supporting the suffragists, Goldman knew true emancipation would come only when there evolved "a great race of women who could look liberty in the face." She stressed the need for birth control, condemned the white slave traffic, and saw marriage itself as a kind of enslavement of women, a social arrangement not synonymous with love but actually antagonistic to it. She claimed woman "has been lulled into a trance by the songs of the troubadours.… And though she is beginning to appreciate that all this incense has befogged her mind and paralyzed her soul, she hates to give up the tribute laid at her feet by sentimental moonshiners of the past." She was many years ahead of her time in advocating social, economic, and sexual freedom and equality for women—a cause which was embodied in her philosophy that individual liberty for all must prevail against the coercive state. Viewing all government as repressive—whether it be capitalistic or Marxist—she opposed the war fervor of World War I by holding anticonscription meetings, for which she and her longtime friend and comrade Alexander Berkman were sentenced to two years in prison and then deported.

In spite of appeals from Americans as prominent as H. L. Mencken, Goldman was never allowed in the country again except for a brief lecture tour of 90 days in 1934. After the publication of Goldman's My Disillusionment in Russia (1923), Mencken wrote that the U.S. sustained a loss by exiling Berkman and Goldman. He praised their books on Russia and their ability to write "simple, glowing, and excellent English," and concluded America was not so rich in literary talent and honest criticism that she could afford to kick them out of the country. But an exile this heroic woman remained until her death, when the Immigration Service allowed her to be buried in Chicago's Waldheim Cemetery near the graves of her Haymarket comrades.

Other Works:

Anarchism, and Other Essays (1911). My Further Disillusionment in Russia (1924). My Disillusionment in Russia (combining the two former books, 1925). Voltairine De Cleyre (1933).

Bibliography:

Anderson, M., My Thirty Years War (1930). Berkman, A., Bolshevik Myth (1925). Berkman, A., Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912). Chalberg, J., Emma Goldman: American Individualist (1991). Drinnon, R., Introduction to Anarchism, and Other Essays by E. Goldman (1969). Drinnon, R.,Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman (1961). Duberman, M. B., Mother Earth: An Epic of Emma Goldman's Life (1991). Eastman, M., Enjoyment of Living (1948). Shulman, A. K., ed., Red Emma Speaks (1972). Shulman, A. K., To the Barricades: The Anarchist Life of E. Goldman (1971). Shulman, A. K., ed., Traffic in Women, and Other Essays on Feminism (1971). West, R., Introduction to My Disillusionment in Russia by E. Goldman (1970).