Voltairine De Cleyre

• Voltairine De Cleyre
• Born: November 17, 1866
• Died: June 20, 1912

Anarchist-feminist theorist and activist, was born in Leslie, Michigan, the last of three daughters of Hector Auguste de Claire and Harriet (Billings) de Claire. Her par-ents separated before Voltairine was five, and her father plied his trade of itinerant tailor in northern Michigan while Harriet de Claire and her two daughters—the oldest child had drowned in 1867—lived in St. Johns, Michigan. The family, supported by the mother’s earnings as a seamstress and with occasional assistance from the father, was often destitute.

In 1879 de Cleyre went to Port Huron, Michigan, to live with her father, who in September 1880 enrolled her in a convent school, Our Lady of the Lake in Sarnia, Ontario, over the objections of her mother, who was a Protestant. He hoped that strict schooling would develop his younger daughter’s superior intellectual gifts and curb her personality, which was wild, impulsive, and not amenable to discipline. She was graduated with distinction in December 1883 and returned to her mother and sister in St. Johns.

The years at the convent profoundly influenced de Cleyre. Although she admired the selflessness and dedication of the nuns, her rebellious temperament chafed at the regulations. She was occasionally openly defiant, and often subversively so; nevertheless, her academic work earned her a gold medal at graduation. Although she later viewed the convent as a crucible that formed her anarchism and hardened her hatred of repressive institutions, its greater role was to develop in her a love of order and a powerful belief in the necessity of self-control, qualities that conflicted strongly with the equally powerful urge for untrammeled freedom that had been generated in her childhood. The simultaneous promptings of these opposing characteristics created severe mental anguish for her, but they also helped her produce her most insightful analyses of human behavior.

De Cleyre remained in St. Johns until 1886. Unable to earn an adequate income as a private teacher of music, French, and penmanship, and burdened by the tension of living with a querulous, demanding mother and a sister who resented her expensive education, de Cleyre went briefly to an aunt in Grenville, Michigan, and then to Grand Rapids, where she began her radical career as a freethinker, writing for and editing the Progressive Age and traveling in the Midwest and East on the free-thought lecture circuit.

By 1887 de Cleyre had embraced socialism, convinced that it addressed more directly than the free-thought movement the problems of industrial capitalism, the growing chasm between rich and poor, and class conflict. She quickly became dissatisfied with political collectivism, however, and with what she perceived as the socialists’ conventional standards of behavior, especially for women. By 1888 she had turned to the anarchists, who accepted her nonconformist personal life as well as her political radicalism.

Her mentor in the anarchist movement was Dyer D. Lum, a printer and union organizer who committed himself both to the preservation of anarchism’s working-class orientation and to the creation of a theoretical foundation for the unification of all anarchist factions. De Cleyre adopted his position on these issues and carried on his work after his suicide in 1893.

Lum did not contribute to the development of de Cleyre’s feminist theory, which emerged from a linkage of the anarchist belief in the primacy of individual autonomy with her own experience as an unconventional woman in Victorian America. Beginning in 1891, she argued that the oppression of women is rooted in the domestic relationship, specifically in marriage and the nuclear family, with its interlocking elements of financial, psychological, and social dependence. She argued in several essays that the necessary conditions for sexual equality are full economic independence for women, the abolition of marriage and the nuclear family, and the destruction of industrial capitalism.

While developing her feminist ideology, de Cleyre also struggled, as a woman radical living in an inegalitarian society, to liberate herself from economic and emotional dependence on men without abandoning erotic relationships with them. De Cleyre managed to avoid both marriage and economic dependence, but the emotional cost was often high. She had numerous lovers and admirers, including T. Hamilton Garside, a flamboyant former preacher who hurtied through the anarchist movement in the late 1880s, and who abruptly abandoned de Cleyre after living with her for a few months. Her affair with Dyer D. Lum probably began in 1889 and lasted intermittently until his death. During the same period she was involved with James Elliott, a Philadelphia carpenter and freethinker who fathered her only child. After Lum’s death she met Samuel Gordon, a young Jewish immigrant whom she put through medical school; their relationship was so turbulent that both attempted suicide.

De Cleyre moved to Philadelphia in 1889, boarding with James Elliott and his mother. In June 1890 she bore a son, Vermorel Elliott (who changed his name in his teens to Harry de Cleyre). Leaving their son with Elliott, de Cleyre spent the next year in Kansas, lecturing for the Women’s National Liberal Union, a free-thought feminist organization, of which she was a charter member. Once back in Philadelphia, de Cleyre shut her son out of her life without discernible regret or reflection, although she continued to live with the Elliotts until 1894 and lived in the same city thereafter. James Elliott sent the boy out to shift for himself when he was ten, and Harry de Cleyre did not know his mother until he was fifteen. Both parents treated him shabbily, yet he and his mother developed a relationship in the last few years before her death.

De Cleyre believed that her work was more important than her parenthood. Her first decade in Philadelphia was marked by tireless activity. In 1892 she helped found the Ladies Liberal League, which, its genteel name notwithstanding, was both radical and feminist. She lectured on various radical and reform platforms, wrote for Lucifer and the Boston Investigator, published poetry and sketches, and developed a reputation as an adroit and powerful speaker. In 1897 a lecture tour of England and Scotland enhanced her international reputation and brought her into contact with leading anarchist figures, including Prince Peter Kropotkin. Returning home, she organized local anarchists as open-air orators in the City Hall courtyard. Involved during the 1890s in the development of the Radical Library, a club for native-born and immigrant anarchists, in 1901 she was one of the founders of the Social Science Club, the leading anarchist organization in the city.

During these years de Cleyre supported herself as a teacher of English to immigrant Jews, among whom she lived from 1894 to 1910. Because she refused to accept fees for her anarchist lectures or essays, she was obliged to maintain a heavy schedule of lessons. She learned Yiddish and sometimes converted her students to anarchism. In December 1902 one of those students, Herman Helcher, tried to kill her, shooting her three times at close range. Her wounds were critical; slowly recovering, she urged her comrades to raise funds for Helcher’s defense and refused to identify him for the police. He was convicted nevertheless.

De Cleyre never regained her health completely. She had suffered with ear and throat problems for years; after she was shot she suffered from a chronic pounding in the ears and a throat condition that often left her unable to speak or concentrate for weeks at a time. In 1905, desperate, she again attempted suicide. She began to recover in 1906, resuming her arduous schedule and adding Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth to the list of publications for which she wrote.

On February 20, 1908, de Cleyre was arrested for inciting to riot during an angry demonstration of unemployed Italian and Jewish immigrants. Acquitted, she spent several months raising funds for the families of the immigrant men who were sent to jail for their part in the demonstration. Afterward de Cleyre faced a long crisis of faith during which she doubted not the desirability but the attainability of an anarchist society. Restless and dissatisfied with her life and her work, she moved to Chicago in 1910. By 1911 the Mexican revolution, which she perceived as fundamentally anarchist, had rekindled her hopes, and she lectured, wrote, and raised funds for the Mexican rebels until March 1912, when, at the age of forty-five, her final illness overtook her. She died in Chicago from complications following an ear operation.

Voltairine de Cleyre was considered by her comrades the second most important woman in the anarchist movement, after Emma Goldman, who is far better known today. Nevertheless, de Cleyre was a more methodical thinker and a better theorist than Goldman. At least three of her essays—Anarchism (1901), Anarchism and American Traditions (1909), and The Dominant Idea (1910)—are classic expositions of American anarchist thought, lucidly and gracefully written. Her significance for twentieth-century feminists rests on her willingness to persevere, often at great personal cost, in her attempts not only to develop a radical feminist ideology, but also to live in conformity with her principles, thereby forcing those who came into contact with her to confront her philosophy in the particular as well as in the abstract.

Many of de Cleyre’s essays, sketches, and poems were collected in her Selected Works (1914). Significant manuscript material, including letters, unpublished essays and sketches, and in some cases photographs, are in the Labadie Collection, University of Michigan; the Joseph Ishill Collections at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and the University of Florida Library, Gainesville; and the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Holland. Emma Goldman wrote a biography, Voltairine de Cleyre (1932), which perpetuates the myth of de Cleyre as a grim ascetic. P. Avrich, An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre (1978), is a sympathetic yet unsentimental account of her life, with full bibliographic references. There is also substantial information on de Cleyre’s life and work in M. S. Marsh, Anarchist Women (1981).