Emma Goldman (June 27 [O.S. June 15], 1869 - May 14, 1940) was an anarchist political activist and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Born in Kaunas, Russian Empire (now Lithuania), to a Jewish family, Goldman emigrated to the United States in 1885. Attracted to anarchism after the Chicago Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and ...
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Emma Goldman (June 27 [O.S. June 15], 1869 - May 14, 1940) was an anarchist political activist and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Born in Kaunas, Russian Empire (now Lithuania), to a Jewish family, Goldman emigrated to the United States in 1885. Attracted to anarchism after the Chicago Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands. She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Frick survived the attempt on his life in 1892, and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth. In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested-along with 248 others-in the so-called Palmer Raids during the First Red Scare and deported to Russia. Initially supportive of that country's October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, Goldman changed her opinion in the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion; she denounced the Soviet Union for its violent repression of independent voices. She left the Soviet Union and in 1923 published a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote an autobiography called Living My Life. It was published in two volumes, in 1931 and 1935. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Goldman traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto, Canada, on May 14, 1940, aged 70. During her life, Goldman was lionized as a freethinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and denounced by detractors as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman gained iconic status in the 1970s by a revival of interest in her life, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest. (wikipedia.org)
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Emma Goldman's career as a labor organizer and Socialist advocate is a common theme in Socialist literature of the early 20th Century. These writers fail to provide their readers with the end of the story. When Ms. Goldman went to the Soviet Union, she found not a "worker's paradise," but rather a murdering dictatorship. The worker was being used as a pawn, and the rhetoric of labor was only a cover story for Lenin's personal ambition. This book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in the US labor movement, Socialism, or the early development of the Soviet Union. Perhaps Emma's best service as a "working-class hero" would have been to share her hard lesson, and to warn the American labor movement away from Socialist leanings -- but of course they didn't listen.
Thomas D
Nov 8, 2012
Russia Seen by Emma
What a remarkable portrait of the early days of the revolution in Russia! This is an intimate description of how the Russian Revolution was stolen by a small but determined group; how the Bolsheviks managed to subvert the ideals that inspired the people's revolt against a post-feudal capitalist order.
