Emma Goldman

Works

• 1910Anarchism and Other Essays

  Lectures on anarchism, prisons, political violence, the “traffic in women”, marriage and love, and why the vote will not free women.

• 1931Living My Life

  Autobiography from her emigration in 1885 to the years after her deportation, including the break with the Bolsheviks.

Position

Goldman was not a systematic philosopher but a lecturer and essayist who gave anarchism a voice in America. She took her social theory from Kropotkin and Bakunin: the state, property and organised religion keep people in dependence, and a free society would rest on voluntary cooperation. From Nietzsche and Ibsen she took the emphasis on the free individual against conformity and the “majority”, and she lectured on modern drama as a vehicle of social criticism. Her originality lay in extending anarchism to private life. In essays such as “The Traffic in Women” and “Marriage and Love” (both 1910) she described marriage as an economic arrangement that turns women into property, defended free love and argued that the vote would not free women as long as they remained bound by convention; Mary Wollstonecraft was one of her models. She was arrested for distributing information on contraception and was among the few public figures of her time to defend homosexual people. She opposed the First World War and conscription. Having welcomed the Russian Revolution, she saw the suppression of the Kronstadt sailors in 1921 and became one of the first critics on the left of the Bolshevik state in My Disillusionment in Russia (1923).

Life & context

Emma Goldman was born in 1869 into a Jewish family in Kovno (Kaunas), then in the Russian Empire, and grew up there, in Königsberg and in St Petersburg. In 1885 she emigrated to Rochester, New York, and worked in clothing factories. The execution of the Haymarket anarchists in Chicago in 1887 made her an anarchist. In New York she met Johann Most and Alexander Berkman, her lifelong companion, and in 1892 helped plan Berkman’s failed attempt on the life of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick. She was jailed in 1893 for a speech to the unemployed, trained as a nurse and midwife in Vienna, and from 1906 to 1917 published the magazine Mother Earth. In 1917 she was sentenced to two years for opposing conscription, and in December 1919 she was deported to Soviet Russia. She left in 1921, lived in Britain, France and Canada, supported the Spanish anarchists from 1936 and died in Toronto in 1940.

Further main works

• The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914)
• My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)