Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman (June 27 [O.S. June 15], 1869 – May 14, 1940) is an anarchist political activist and writer.

She plays a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

Born in Kaunas, Russian Empire (now Lithuania), to a Jewish family, Goldman emigrate to the United States in 1885.

Attracted to anarchism after the Chicago Haymarket affair, Goldman becomes 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, plan to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed

Frick survives the attempt on his life in 1892, and Berkma nis sentenced to twenty-two years in prison.

Goldman is imprisoned several times in the years that follow, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control.

In 1906, Goldman founds the anarchist journal Mother Earth.

In 1917, Goldman and Berkman are 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 are arrested—along with two hundred and forty-eight 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 changes her opinion in the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion; she denounces the Soviet Union for its violent repression of independent voices.

She leaves the Soviet Union and in 1923 publishes a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia.

While living in England, Canada, and France, she writes an autobiography called Living My Life.

It is published in two volumes, in 1931 and 1935.

After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Goldman travels to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there.

She dies in Toronto, Canada, on May 14, 1940, aged seventy.

During her life, Goldman wis 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 span a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality.

Although she distances herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she develops new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism.

After decades of obscurity, Goldman will gain iconic status in the 1970s by a revival of interest in her life, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindle popular interest.

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