Goldman, Emma

GOLDMAN, EMMA (1869–1940).Emma Goldman was one of the most admired and influential members of a transnational anarchist movement that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her epic life of engagement in labor struggles, free speech fights, anticolonial and antiwar movements, anarchist organizing, lecturing, publishing and writing seems to belong not to one woman but to many.

Inspired especially by Peter Kropotkin, Goldman espoused a vision of a stateless society organized around small communes and collectives. Kropotkinites believed that without the oppressive structure of the state, people's naturally social and cooperative nature would thrive while individuality would also expand. Yet Goldman went far beyond Kropotkin in emphasizing the freedom of women and sexuality as central to the full development of society. She not only supported but embodied an ideal of women's emancipation with her charismatic presence on the lecture platform and her early public discussions of birth control methods, for which she served two weeks in jail. She saw theater as a means of education as well as entertainment, helping to create audiences in the United States for such socially critical playwrights as Ibsen, Strindberg and Wedekind.

While early scholarship on Goldman represented Goldman as more an activist than an original political thinker, later scholars have portrayed her as a theorist in the streets, one whose activism created "political space within which struggles could take place." Feminist theorists have framed Goldman's ambivalence about women, sexuality and much else not as a limitation but as a useful resource for contemporary feminists to think with and through.

Goldman was controversial inside as well as outside the anarchist movement of her time. Some contemporary anarchists were uncomfortable with her outspoken defense of homosexuality, women's emancipation and birth control and her association with middle-class intellectuals. But between the time she entered the anarchist movement in the late 1880s and her deportation to Russia in 1919, Emma Goldman cut a wide swathe across the American imagination, a terrorist to some, an inspiration to others. Many young early twentieth century feminists admired her challenge to Victorian values and celebrated her as a feminist heroine despite her criticism of the suffrage movement. Homosexuals saw in her an ally and a friend. Labor leaders such as Big Bill Haywood of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) counted her a fellow militant. While she paid limited attention to lynching and to the widespread violence against African Americans, failing to recognize the centrality of racism to domination and inequality, she acknowledged that failure late in her life.

Goldman was born in present-day Lithuania in 1869 to a German-speaking Jewish family of shopkeepers. After attending schools in Konigsberg and St. Petersburg, she immigrated to Rochester, New York in 1885 to join her sister, going to work in a garment factory. Soon she was radicalized by the resistance of the Chicago Haymarket anarchists at their trial of 1886-1887. Following their execution, she left Rochester to join the anarchist movement in New York City where she rapidly became known as a witty and courageous speaker. At a time of growing violence against strikers and assaults on labor more broadly, she helped support Alexander Berkman's failed attempt to assassinate steel magnate Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892, an attempt which led to Berkman's imprisonment for fourteen years. While Goldman always defended Berkman, she came to modify her views about the attentat—an individual act of violence against authority— arguing that strikes, street demonstrations, and other forms of non-violent direct action were more politically effective, at least in the United States.

Bereft following Berkman's imprisonment, Goldman stepped up her speaking at protests and strikes, serving a year in prison herself in 1893 on charges of "inciting to riot" during a hunger demonstration in New York City. Eventually she started crisscrossing the country on hugely successful annual lecture tours—in English—aimed at broadening the anarchist movement beyond small immigrant circles. Hounded by the police and frequently denied access to halls, she waged free-speech fights, often in solidarity with the IWW. When accused of inspiring the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, Goldman went underground for several years, drawing on her year of midwifery training in Vienna to support herself as a private duty nurse.

In 1906, on Berkman's release from prison, Goldman and Berkman began publishing Mother Earth, an influential monthly magazine of culture and politics. In Mother Earth, as in her lectures and books, Goldman helped link European anarchist thought with American traditions of dissent including that of mid-western free lovers, individualist libertarians and Greenwich Village bohemians. However, the heart of the anarchist movement in America remained in the Yiddish, Spanish, Italian and other foreign-language groups with whom Goldman maintained ambivalent relations.

After spending a year in prison for opposing conscription during World War I, Goldman along with Berkman was deported to Soviet Russia. Despite her reservations she had defended the October revolution. But she became increasingly outraged at the Bolsheviks' growing persecution of Russian anarchists, who had initially supported the revolution. Following the violent suppression of the Kronstadt uprising of March 1921, both Goldman and Berkman became outspoken critics. They left Russia in December 1921 to settle in Berlin where Goldman wrote My Disillusionment in Russia (1923), one of the earliest critiques from the left of Soviet repression of its former allies. Eight years later she published an autobiography, Living My Life, which narrated her dramatic career as an activist and public intellectual. It also acknowledged frankly her conflicted personal life, including her tormented ten year passion for an eccentric and irresponsible figure, Dr. Ben Reitman, who nonetheless was quite effective as her publicist and "manager."

Goldman lived to see a brief realization of her ideals in the anarchist revolution of Catalonia, Spain in the fall of 1936, at the start of the Spanish Civil War. In her late sixties she traveled to Spain three times and was thrilled to visit anarchist collectives and witness Barcelona in the hands of the working class. Returning after each visit to London, she raised funds for the Spanish anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists. With the heartbreaking defeats, first of the anarchists and then of the Spanish Republic in 1939, Goldman returned to Toronto, Canada, where she continued her efforts on behalf of Spanish anarchist refugees and Italian antifascists facing deportation.

Despite arrests, harassment, imprisonment, deportation and the aching loneliness and hardships of exile, Emma Goldman remained indefatigable in her commitment to an anti-capitalist and anti-statist vision of anarchism while supporting through her presence, her speech and her writing a wide range of struggles. More than most of her contemporaries on the left, she recognized the internalized psychological forms of oppression that limited people's ability to resist domination, especially women. She continues to inspire progressive activists as well as all sorts of creative endeavors, from clinics and cafes to bookstores, theatrical performances and films. Feminist and other scholars continue to mine her ambivalences, her "thinking in the streets," her "panache."

Goldman died of a stroke in Toronto in 1940 and was buried outside Chicago, in the country she always regarded as her home.

Falk, Candace, Barry Pateman and Jessica M. Moran, eds. Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years. Vol. 1, Made for America, 1890-1901. Berkeley: University of California Press., 2003; vol. 2, Making Speech Free, 1902-1909. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005; vol. 3: Light and Shadows, 1910-1916. Stanford, CA: Stanford, 2012.

Ferguson, Kathy E. Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011.

Hemmings, Clare. Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

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

Wexler, Alice. Emma Goldman in Exile. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.