Emma Goldman

10 Key excerpts on "Emma Goldman"

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  Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity

  The Lives and Work of Intellectual Women

  • Lori Marso, Lori Jo Marso(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5. A Feminist Search for Love Emma Goldman on the Politics of Marriage, Love, Sexuality, and the Feminine Emma Goldman is far better known for her dramatic life and for her anarchism than for any contribution to political and feminist theory. An anarchist activist who constantly challenged the political and social status quo, Goldman was a rousing orator, a prolific pamphleteer, as well as founder and editor of the anarchist journal Mother Earth. She was jailed many times—once for two years—for her political activity that included support for the labor movement and striking workers, opposition to the WWI draft, advocating free speech and free love, work on the birth control campaign, and opposition to state and government power. In late 1919, Goldman was deported from the United States to the Soviet Union along with several hundred other immigrant radicals including her longtime colleague, friend, and early lover, Alexander Berkman. 1 Hoping to find some of their ideals enacted in the Soviet Revolution, 2 Goldman and Berkman were severely disappointed by the concentration of state power and the suppression of dissidents in their country of birth. 3 Goldman famously chronicled her anarchist activities in her two-volume autobiography, Living My Life. Her presentation is fascinating for its historical context as well as for details of the sacrifices and commitments such an intense political life required. I argue that it is not solely Goldman’s political life that makes her important for us to study today. It is in the intersection of her life with her thought—specifically her intimate and sexual life as studied in conjunction with her essays on marriage, sex, love, women’s emancipation, and femininity—where a study of Goldman contributes important insights to contemporary feminist debates. Most importantly, she helps us to think about the connections and tensions among sexuality, love, and feminist politics

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  Considering Emma Goldman

  Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive

  • Clare Hemmings(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  5 She dramatised her politics and sensa-tionalised her subjectivity as part of a highly developed strategy of promot-ing anarchism and herself as its advocate. The eloquent Christine Stansell describes Goldman’s own person as embodying “both celebrity and politics, spectacle and radicalism, universality and self-aggrandizement” (2000, 121), noting further than such liveliness resulted in her being offered a place in vaudeville (an offer she refused), as well as making her a target for the Amer-ican authorities who were extremely anxious about her popularity (138). 6 A range of writers, myself included, have embraced Goldman’s enthusiasm and tenacity through characterising them as “passion” (Hemmings 2012b, 2014b; Rogness and Foust 2011), 7 yet this has also been a technique through which her contributions as a serious political theorist have been dismissed (see Weiss and Kensinger 2007). The tension between a critical desire for Goldman and her own aware-ness and exploitation of this desire can be seen in the use of the diminutive to refer to her. The more attached to Goldman critics are, the more likely they 4 • INTRODUCTION are to want to demonstrate their intimacy with her through use of first name terms. Thus for Falk, Goldman is “feisty-edgy Emma” (2007, 43), and for Ja-mie Heckert while “Butler may have taught” us certain things (2012, 73) and “Rosenberg offers . . . ” contemporary anarchists certain insights, it is “Emma” who “has called us to be, to feel” (71). The special issue of Social Anarchism on Goldman is straightforwardly titled “It’s All about Emma,” and within its pages Kathryn Rosenfeld (2004 – 5) reflects on the importance for her and her friends of asking playfully “What would Emma do?” when faced with hard political or intellectual choices, while Sharon Presley (2004 – 5) takes up a “complex” Emma to rally a contemporary activist audience to be more daring.

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  Russia in World History

  A Transnational Approach

  • Choi Chatterjee(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  In the process, they pledged allegiance to abstract entities such as national political parties, the state, and the market. These entities were to efficiently organize the entirety of human existence without any input from individuals. Goldman refused to acquiesce to the new systems and proudly held fast to her principles: all the way to political oblivion. Her continued search for radical equality, and her refusal to consider either authoritarian dictatorship or parliamentary democracy as the only two political options in the world, set Goldman apart from those on the Left, the liberal center, and the Right. Till the very end of her life, Goldman was un-persuaded by arguments generated by “common sense” and “pragmatism”: intellectual positions that convince us that the present is the best of all possible worlds. She died as she had lived: certain that the journey was more important than the destination; and that her ideal of a self-governing individual in a self-governing society was worth fighting for. 7 Emma Goldman was born in Kovno (Kaunas, Lithuania) to a Jewish family in the Russian Empire in 1869. Goldman spent three years in a ghetto in St. Petersburg from 1882 to 1885 (important years of nihilist activity in Russia) as a teenager, during which she became enamored with the life of revolutionary politics. Goldman immigrated to the United States in 1885 at the age of seventeen to escape from her autocratic father and messy family politics that impaired her desire for freedom and independence. She learned about anarchist philosophy through immersion in factory work, intensive reading, and conversations with working-class intellectuals. 8 Thirty-four years later, federal authorities forcibly deported Goldman to the Soviet Union in 1919 along with 249 other radicals. 9 Deportation was among the many repressive tactics that the government used to contain the American labor movement during the infamous period dubbed the Red Scare

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  Radicals, Volume 2: Memoir, Essays, and Oratory

  Audacious Writings by American Women, 1830-1930

  • Meredith Stabel, Zachary Turpin, Meredith Stabel, Zachary Turpin(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • University Of Iowa Press

    (Publisher)

  Emma Goldman 1869–1940 Emma Goldman was an anarchist and feminist activist who emigrated to the United States from the Russian Empire (now Lithuania) in 1885. Disillusioned by her experiences working in clothing factories, she traveled around the country advocating for women’s rights, birth control, free love, free speech, radical education, and the right for workers to organize. Goldman edited and contributed to Mother Earth, an anarchist publication, from 1906 until it was shut down in 1917 under the Espionage Act. The first selection from her work was published in Mother Earth in 1909. She also wrote several books, including Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), from which the second selection is excerpted, and Living My Life (1931). Goldman was arrested several times for revolutionary activities, including making “incendiary speeches,” “inciting riots,” lecturing on birth control, and criticizing mandatory military conscription during World War I

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  Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1800-1925

  A Bio-Critical Sourcebook

  • Karlyn Kohrs Campbell(Author)
  • 1993(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Emma Goldman (1869-1940), feminist anarchist MARTHA SOLOMON When sixteen-year-old Emma Goldman arrived in the United States as an im- migrant from Russia in 1885, almost nothing in her background suggested her future fame as a strident advocate for anarchism, a scathing critic of cherished U.S. institutions, and an influential figure in U.S. intellectual and social history. With little formal education and less money, she, like most immigrants, saw the United States as the land of opportunity. Still, her experiences with repressive politics in Russia, her identification with the radical idealism of the Russian Nihilists, and her reading of revolutionary literature had sown the seeds for her commitment to social change (Living My Life, 26-29). While the trial and execution of the Haymarket anarchists in 1887 distressed her deeply, the injustice of their fate also provided her with a direction for her enormous energies. Their deaths, she later recalled, "gave me the first impulse towards the vision for which the Chicago men had been done to death by the blind furies of wealth and power" (Johann Most, American Mercury, June 1926:158). Inspired by their martyrdom, she began regularly attending socialist meetings and eagerly writing for advertised literature. "I devoured every line on anarchism I could get," she wrote in her autobiography (Living My Life, 9-10). BACKGROUND With her ideology still evolving, in 1889 Goldman moved to New York City and into the active radical community there. Here a chain of circumstances led her to assume the role of public advocate for anarchism. She immediately met Johann Most, whose radical writings had inspired her growing commitment to anarchism. Himself a renowned and effective orator, Most perceived Goldman's potential as a public speaker. Encouraging and training her, he soon arranged speaking engagements. Those initial lectures, in which she simply parroted Most's ideas, taught her two important lessons as a speaker.

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  Beyond the End of History

  Rejecting the Washington Consensus

  • Keith Preston(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Black House Publishing Ltd

    (Publisher)

  [54]

  By early 1936, Alexander Berkman was living in Nice, France and was terminally ill with cancer. Emma went to visit him hoping to say her final goodbyes but when she arrived she found that Berkman, not wanting to burden his friends with his care, had shot himself. Later that year, the civil war had begun in Spain and the Spanish anarchist movement began to actually carry out a revolution in certain regions of the country. Emma journeyed to Barcelona to witness the revolution in progress and finally enjoyed the opportunity to briefly experience a society where anarchists had become the dominant political force. However, the revolution did not go well as the anarchists were left fighting a two-front war with the forces of General Francisco Franco and the Communist forces backed by the Soviet Union. After the defeat of the anarchists, Goldman returned to Canada in 1939. Now seventy years old, her health began failing just as World War Two was beginning. Goldman remained true to her lifelong antimilitarist convictions. She described the coming war as a “new kind of madness in the world.”

  Emma Goldman died on February 17, 1940 in Toronto, Canada at the age of 70 after suffering a series of debilitating strokes. Her remains were interred in Forest Park, Illinois outside of Chicago alongside the graves of the Haymarket martyrs who had inspired Emma to take up the cause of anarchism more than a half century earlier.[55]

  The Historical Context of Classical Anarchism The life and work of Emma Goldman cannot be fully understood outside the historical context of the classical anarchist movement that her legacy famously represents. Anarchism was a movement to which Goldman was committed with nothing less than religious fervor. Its core doctrines defined her worldview and political activism, and she was arguably as influential and effective as a propagandist for the cause of anarchism as anyone who ever claimed that political mantle. Nearly a century after the heyday of Goldman’s radical activism, only a handful of names from the era of classical anarchism are as definitive of the movement’s memory as her own.

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  Red Emma Speaks

  An Emma Goldman Reader

  • Alix Kates Shulman(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Open Road Media

    (Publisher)

  The episode marked the beginning of a permanent rift in the U.S. anarchist movement, and of a new phase in Goldman’s career. Her demonic legend was launched. Her own trial and conviction the following year, for delivering a speech that allegedly incited the New York unemployed to riot (though no riot occurred), was, predictably, sensational news. To a reporter Goldman predicted her own one-year sentence, “Not because my offense deserves it, but because I am an anarchist.” When she emerged from prison a year later, she found herself a notorious celebrity. “Red Emma,” she was called, enemy of God, law, marriage, the State. There was no one else like her in America.

  Dedication to her vision kept Goldman traveling and speaking in the succeeding years, participating in each radical crisis as it came up, while her mounting reputation packed in the audiences. At a time when the lecture circuit was big business, “Red Emma,” with her legendary gifts of speech, was one of the star performers of the continent. Generous and loyal almost to a fault, she moved back and forth across the country collecting funds and supporters for every movement cause, large or small. Frequently she supported herself with odd jobs to avoid charging admission so that the poor she most wanted to reach could attend her meetings. In prison in 1894 she had mastered English in order to reach the American “natives”; now thousands of new people, many of whom went to her lectures to be scandalized and titillated, fell under the spell of her idealism—or, at the least, came away impressed by her integrity. The veteran civil libertarian Roger Baldwin, for example, describes the kind of response Goldman’s presence frequently inspired:

  When I was a youngster just out of Harvard, Emma Goldman came to town to lecture. I was asked to hear her. I was indignant at the suggestion that I could be interested in a woman firebrand reputed to be in favor of assassination, free love, revolution, and atheism; but curiosity got me there. It was the eye-opener of my life. Never before had I heard such social passion, such courageous exposure of basic evils, such electric power behind words, such a sweeping challenge to all values I had been taught to hold highest. From that day forth I was her admirer.3

  After two trips to Europe (1895 and 1899), during which she studied nursing and midwifery in Vienna, lectured in London, and attended clandestine anarchist meetings in Paris, she began to build an international reputation in revolutionary circles. Such celebrated European anarchists as Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and the veteran of the Paris Commune, Louise Michel, came to know and admire her.

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  Essays

  • Emma Goldman, August Nemo(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Tacet Books

    (Publisher)

  When Emma Goldman arrived in New York in 1889, she experienced little difficulty in associating herself with active Anarchists. Anarchist meetings were an almost daily occurrence. The first lecturer she heard on the Anarchist platform was Dr. A. Solotaroff. Of great importance to her future development was her acquaintance with John Most, who exerted a tremendous influence over the younger elements. His impassioned eloquence, untiring energy, and the persecution he had endured for the Cause, all combined to enthuse the comrades. It was also at this period that she met Alexander Berkman, whose friendship played an important part throughout her life. Her talents as a speaker could not long remain in obscurity. The fire of enthusiasm swept her toward the public platform. Encouraged by her friends, she began to participate as a German and Yiddish speaker at Anarchist meetings. Soon followed a brief tour of agitation taking her as far as Cleveland. With the whole strength and earnestness of her soul she now threw herself into the propaganda of Anarchist ideas. The passionate period of her life had begun. Through constantly toiling in sweat shops, the fiery young orator was at the same time very active as an agitator and participated in various labor struggles, notably in the great cloakmakers' strike, in 1889, led by Professor Garsyde and Joseph Barondess.

  A year later Emma Goldman was a delegate to an Anarchist conference in New York. She was elected to the Executive Committee, but later withdrew because of differences of opinion regarding tactical matters. The ideas of the German-speaking Anarchists had at that time not yet become clarified. Some still believed in parliamentary methods, the great majority being adherents of strong centralism. These differences of opinion in regard to tactics led in 1891 to a breach with John Most. Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and other comrades joined the group AUTONOMY, in which Joseph Peukert, Otto Rinke, and Claus Timmermann played an active part. The bitter controversies which followed this secession terminated only with the death of Most, in 1906.

  A great source of inspiration to Emma Goldman proved the Russian revolutionists who were associated in the group ZNAMYA. Goldenberg, Solotaroff, Zametkin, Miller, Cahan, the poet Edelstadt, Ivan von Schewitsch, husband of Helene von Racowitza and editor of the VOLKSZEITUNG, and numerous other Russian exiles, some of whom are still living, were members of this group. It was also at this time that Emma Goldman met Robert Reitzel, the German-American Heine, who exerted a great influence on her development. Through him she became acquainted with the best writers of modern literature, and the friendship thus begun lasted till Reitzel's death, in 1898.

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  Anarchism and Other Essays

  • Emma Goldman(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Otbebookpublishing

    (Publisher)

  ANARCHISM

  AND OTHER ESSAYS

  Emma Goldman

  Passage contains an image

  Emma Goldman

  Propagandism is not, as some suppose, a "trade," because nobody will follow a "trade" at which you may work with the industry of a slave and die with the reputation of a mendicant. The motives of any persons to pursue such a profession must be different from those of trade, deeper than pride, and stronger than interest. GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE.

  Among the men and women prominent in the public life of America there are but few whose names are mentioned as often as that of Emma Goldman. Yet the real Emma Goldman is almost quite unknown. The sensational press has surrounded her name with so much misrepresentation and slander, it would seem almost a miracle that, in spite of this web of calumny, the truth breaks through and a better appreciation of this much maligned idealist begins to manifest itself. There is but little consolation in the fact that almost every representative of a new idea has had to struggle and suffer under similar difficulties. Is it of any avail that a former president of a republic pays homage at Osawatomie to the memory of John Brown? Or that the president of another republic participates in the unveiling of a statue in honor of Pierre Proudhon, and holds up his life to the French nation as a model worthy of enthusiastic emulation? Of what avail is all this when, at the same time, the LIVING John Browns and Proudhons are being crucified? The honor and glory of a Mary Wollstonecraft or of a Louise Michel are not enhanced by the City Fathers of London or Paris naming a street after them—the living generation should be concerned with doing justice to the LIVING Mary Wollstonecrafts and Louise Michels. Posterity assigns to men like Wendel Phillips and Lloyd Garrison the proper niche of honor in the temple of human emancipation; but it is the duty of their contemporaries to bring them due recognition and appreciation while they live.

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  Women's International Thought: Towards a New Canon

  • Patricia Owens, Katharina Rietzler, Kimberly Hutchings, Sarah C. Dunstan(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  the United States and internationally, becoming notorious for her (unwitting) involvement in the assassination of President McKinley. Along with other anarchists, she campaigned against US involvement in the First World War, and was part of an anti-conscription league. She was imprisoned on several occasions, and was eventually deported from the United States in 1919 and never allowed to return. Like Luxemburg, she was extremely suspicious of the centralist tendencies of Bolshevism. She wrote critically about the development of the Russian Revolution, supported the anarchist parties in the Spanish Civil War, and saw the collapse of the League of Nations and the imminence of a second world war as vindicating her views about the destructive nature of the state. Goldman and her family were the kind of people that Hull House was set up to help. Goldman, however, disparages Addams in her autobiog- raphy. For Goldman, Addams was part of a middle class do-gooding social democracy that failed to grasp the radical change needed to revo- lutionize individual as well as social life. In her setting out of her anarchist ethical ideal, Goldman identifies God, Property, and the State as the three phantoms keeping humanity from freedom. She is scathing about religion, and the way it attempts to control human thought and feeling. She argues for a world in which the tensions between individual and society, artificially constructed by the institutions of religion, property, and state, will disappear. Anarchism “stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government” (711). Her ethical philosophy here overlaps to some extent with Addams, since Goldman also argued that anarchism needed to be prefigurative.

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