Emma Goldman

Social and Political Activist

• Born: June 27, 1869
• Birthplace: Kovno, Lithuania, Russian Empire (now Kaunas, Lithuania)
• Died: May 14, 1940
• Place of death: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Lithuanian-born American social reformer

A leading member of the anarchic Left in the early twentieth century, Goldman was a critic of capitalism and socialism and an advocate of women’s rights.

Areas of achievement Social reform, women’s rights, literature, economics

Early Life

Emma Goldman was born in Kovno (now Kaunas) in Lithuania, which was then part of the Russian Empire. Her parents, Abraham Goldman and Taube Binowitz Zodikow, were already rearing two daughters, Helena and Lena, from Taube Goldman’s first marriage (she was a widow when she entered into an arranged marriage with Goldman). Beaten frequently by her father and denied comfort by her mother, Emma Goldman was unable to find either emotional or financial security in the Goldman household. For a time, she lived with relatives in Königsberg, a city in the northeastern corner of Germany. Her experience in her uncle’s household was, if anything, worse, and Goldman returned to her parents, who themselves moved first to Königsberg and then, in 1881, to St. Petersburg in Russia.

Goldman did find some satisfaction in life. She was able to attend school in Königsberg, where a young teacher befriended Goldman and introduced her to music and literature, both of which became lifelong sources of pleasure for her. In St. Petersburg, however, the family’s economic privation meant that Goldman had to abandon her hopes of continuing her education and becoming a doctor (her father could not understand why a woman needed an education) to work in factories that made gloves and corsets.

Rebelling against her father’s authority and the Jewish religious and cultural traditions in which she was raised, Goldman became fascinated with radicalism. An avid reader, she found inspiration in Vera Pavlovna, the heroine of Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s radical novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), who defied authority and convention. Especially meaningful to Goldman, whose father suggested arranging a marriage for her, was Pavlovna’s rejection of that practice as the auctioning of a sex object. Goldman also admired the martyred young women who had been active participants in the 1870’s Russian radical movement, the People’s Will.

Goldman sought immediate relief from her despair by emigrating to the United States, the land of hope, departing Russia with Helena late in 1885. They intended to live with their sister Lena, who was married and living in Rochester, New York. To Goldman’s dismay, she soon felt trapped in Rochester by the very things she wished to escape: monotonous, low-paying work in a clothing factory, further talk of an arranged marriage, and the presence of her parents, who followed their daughters to the United States.

Again, Goldman found inspiration in the story of martyred radicals: four men executed (a fifth committed suicide) in November, 1887, for the bomb murder of several Chicago police officers during a mass workers’ meeting at the Haymarket Square in Chicago the previous year. What especially angered Goldman was that the authorities never ascertained who threw the bomb, making it seem clear that the men who had been arrested were really being tried for their beliefs. If injustices similar to those that occurred in Russia could also take place in the United States, reasoned Goldman, it was time for her to align herself with the opponents of capitalism and of its tools, the state and the church.

Later, in Rochester, Goldman fell in love with a fellow worker, the handsome and seemingly intellectual Jacob Kersner, whom she married in February, 1887. The marriage seemed to offer escape from familial pressures but did not succeed. Kersner proved to be impotent and took comfort in gambling with his cronies. For a time, Goldman tried to avoid the stigma of divorce, but at age twenty, she divorced Kersner and moved to New Haven, Connecticut. She briefly returned to Rochester, remarried Kersner, divorced him a second time, and moved to New York City.

Life’s Work

Among the new friends Goldman made in the immigrant neighborhoods of New York’s Lower East Side, two stood out: Alexander Berkman and Johann Most, who had made a name for himself in Germany and became a leading figure among anarchists in the United States. Although she was familiar with socialist thought, she regarded it as menacing to individual freedom because it accepted large state-owned industry as positive. Anarchism, in contrast, promised a society based on justice and reason and opposed both the centralization of the corporation and the centralization of the state.

Schooled by Most in both anarchist theory and public speaking, Goldman made her first speaking tour in 1890 and was delighted to realize that she had the power to sway people with the spoken word. She also came to realize, however, that the words she was speaking were not hers but Most’s, and she repudiated his mentorship. Converts to anarchism and to the communal living that Goldman and Berkman advocated were disappointingly few, and the two thought of returning to Russia.

In 1892, a pressing new cause kept them in the United States: planning the assassination of tycoon Henry Clay Frick, who had violently suppressed a strike at the Homestead steelworks of Pittsburgh. They decided that Berkman would shoot Frick, while Goldman, who helped him plan the assassination attempt, would explain his actions. The affair went awry. Berkman merely wounded Frick, and other radicals, including Most, distanced themselves from Berkman and from assassination as a political weapon.

Goldman had now come to another turning point in her life. She thought of herself not as an exile from Russia but as a woman who could have a meaningful future fighting for change in the United States. Although she escaped prosecution for her role in Berkman’s attack on Frick, she was arrested in 1893 and sentenced to a year in Blackwell’s Island prison for her activities at a protest demonstration in New York’s Union Square.

On her release, Goldman met the Austrian-born anarchist Ed Brady, who wished to marry her. She rejected marriage, but did heed his suggestion to find another outlet for her compassion and sympathy for the downtrodden. To support herself, she was already working as a practical nurse (a vocation she had learned in the prison hospital), and she went to Vienna to earn certificates in nursing and midwifery. During her year in Vienna (1895-1896) and another year in Paris (1899-1900) she also immersed herself in avant-garde literature and drama.

For some time, Goldman hoped to have two careers: the first as a nurse and midwife among the downtrodden in New York, the second as a radical lecturer. The two careers were not necessarily compatible, however, for as a lecturer she was attracting increasing fame as an opponent of war in 1898, of organized Christianity, and of conventional sexual morality. She became widely known as an advocate of free love, a term that added to her notoriety as “Red Emma.” In using the expression “free love,” Goldman meant not indiscriminate sexual activity but love without a legally recognized marriage, which she regarded as one of many devices society used to exploit women.

Goldman again faced prison in 1901 when she was arrested following the assassination of President William McKinley. She was not involved in the crime and was not held for trial, but with her characteristic defiance she could not resist asking Americans to show compassion for the condemned assassin, Leon Czolgosz. Public outrage made it impossible for her to book a lecture hall, and she was further embittered when radicals repudiated Czolgosz. For a while she retreated from public view. Using the pseudonym E. G. Smith, she tended to the poor in New York’s slums.

By 1903, however, she was ready to resume lecturing. In 1906, she undertook a second commitment, that of publisher of a new periodical that she founded and named Mother Earth. She chose the name to suggest that the earth should provide the opportunity for all humankind to lead free and productive lives. Mother Earth would serve as a forum not only for anarchism but also for the issues of the Lyrical Left personal liberation, freedom of artistic expression, and equality in sexual relations.

The journal, however, did not sell well enough to support Goldman after one year it had two thousand subscribers so she had to lecture more than ever. Often traveling with Ben Reitman, the “hobo” doctor who acted as her booking agent, Goldman gave hundreds of speeches a year, reaching out to the “psychologically stifled middle class” as well as to the impoverished. Small of stature, she impressed listeners with her intensity and with her command of humor and sarcasm. In the question-and-answer sessions that usually followed her talks, she also showed a mastery of many subjects that came from countless hours of reading. English had long since become Goldman’s primary language, but although her most publicized lectures were to American audiences, she insisted on making separate lectures in Yiddish.

From 1906 to 1916, Goldman continued to write and lecture on the sins of capitalism and also on art, drama, literature, and women’s issues. She addressed the topic of birth control, criticized the institution of marriage, denounced the corset, and dared women to have more sexual experiences. Much of what she said infuriated social conservatives, but for good measure she also condemned suffragists as single-issue reformers. Ethical and social conventions, she maintained, were bigger obstacles to women’s emancipation than were suffrage restrictions and other external barriers.

From 1914 on, World War I became an issue she had to address. As long as the United States remained neutral, Goldman could freely oppose the war, but even when the United States entered the war in 1917 she remained uncompromising in her opposition to it. No pacifist, she regarded war as more capitalist exploitation. The conscription law that the Woodrow Wilson administration endorsed in 1917 was both repressive and illogical, she asserted, since it meant Prussianizing America in the name of democratizing Germany. Although she did not explicitly advocate resistance to the draft, she and Berkman (who had been released from prison in 1906 and was the editor of Mother Earth) were arrested on June 15, speedily tried, and sentenced to prison terms of two years. In a separate action, the government stopped the publication of Mother Earth.

In 1919, Goldman, Berkman, and more than two hundred other radicals of foreign birth were deported from the United States to Soviet Russia, but life there proved intolerable for her. Goldman did have an interview with Communist leader Vladimir Ilich Lenin, but she soon concluded that a new era of statist repression was dawning.

Goldman left Russia in 1921 and proceeded to relate her observations in lectures and in two books that were condemned by other leftists. At various times she lived in Sweden, England, France, and Canada, writing her memoirs and carrying on a large correspondence with many friends and members of her family with whom she had long before reconciled. In 1934, she was allowed to return to the United States, where she desperately wished to live, just long enough to make a speaking tour. In her last years, she expressed contempt for both Nazism and Stalinism, but when World War II began in September, 1939, she refused to make a choice between the evil of war and the evil of a dictatorship. An individualist to the last, she died in Toronto in 1940.

Significance

During Goldman’s lifetime, anarchism never became a mass creed. If anything, it declined in the United States because of government actions against radicalism, the growing appeal of trade unions, and because communism, especially after the Leninists had gained power in Russia, was able to win more converts. Nevertheless, Goldman was of major importance in the history of American radicalism, for her success lay not in contributing to the demise of capitalism or the state but in alerting people to issues involving personal liberation and self-fulfillment.

Unlike most members of the political left, who argued that the advent of the socialist state would emancipate women, Goldman demanded that women’s issues be addressed immediately. Jeered, arrested, and threatened on many occasions, she won admirers among many middle-class Americans who might not have become converts to her causes but who believed in her right to advance them. She herself became a major spokesperson for free speech. It is therefore in the cultural history of twentieth century America that Goldman has most significance, for the issues she had raised prior to 1918 were issues that again seemed relevant in the 1960’s, when a new generation of American dissenters and feminists rediscovered Goldman and celebrated her as a symbol of defiance and liberation.

Bibliography

Chalberg, John. Emma Goldman, American Individualist. Edited by Oscar Handlin. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Written as part of an ongoing series of brief biographies of eminent Americans, this book provides the best introduction to Goldman’s life.

Drinnon, Richard. Rebel in Paradise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Especially helpful for its explanation of the historical and social context in which Goldman lived. Shows the maturation of Goldman from youthful enthusiast to spokesperson for a cultural revolution.

Fellner, Gene, ed. Life of an Anarchist: The Alexander Berkman Reader. 2d ed. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005. A collection of Berkman’s writings, including several letters he and Goldman wrote each other.

Goldman, Emma. Living My Life. 2 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931. Written while Goldman was residing in St. Tropez, France, this memoir is inaccurate and misleading in many areas but is still the best source for information about Goldman’s childhood.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Nowhere at Home: Letters from Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Edited by Richard Drinnon and Anna Maria Drinnon. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. This topically organized compilation reveals much about Goldman’s thoughts on communism and on the approach of World War II. Thoughtful editorial notes are included.

Moritz, Theresa, and Albert Mortiz. The World’s Most Dangerous Woman: A New Biography of Emma Goldman. Vancouver, B.C.: Subway Books, 2001. This biography focuses on the three periods of Goldman’s life when she lived in Canada, 1926-1928, 1933-1935, and 1939-1940, placing her life there within the larger context of Canadian leftist politics.

Shulman, Alix Kates. To the Barricades: The Anarchist Life of Emma Goldman. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1971. This book for juvenile readers provides a lucid introduction to Goldman’s life and thought.

Solomon, Martha. Emma Goldman. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Solomon analyzes Goldman’s rhetorical style in both her written and spoken words. Provides insight into Goldman’s thought, especially her evaluations of early twentieth century literature and drama.

Wexler, Alice. Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. In this three-hundred-page work, Wexler challenges many views of Goldman and seeks to explain the contradictions between the public Goldman and the private Goldman.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Emma Goldman in Exile. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. Wexler concludes her study of Goldman with this assessment of her last twenty years.

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