A short life of the author
Emma Goldman (27 June 1869 – 14 May 1940) was a Lithuanian-born American anarchist, political activist, writer, and lecturer who became one of the most famous, most feared, and most admired radicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She advocated anarchism, free speech, birth control, workers’ rights, sexual freedom, and women’s autonomy with a fearlessness and rhetorical power that made J. Edgar Hoover call her “one of the most dangerous women in America.” Her autobiography, Living My Life (1931), is one of the great political memoirs in the English language.
Life
Goldman was born in Kaunas, Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire), into a Jewish family. Her childhood was marked by her father’s violence and by the political turbulence of the Russian Empire. She emigrated to the United States in 1885, at sixteen, and settled in Rochester, New York, where she worked in garment factories under conditions that radicalised her.
The Haymarket affair of 1886 — in which anarchists were executed in Chicago following a bombing at a labour rally — was the event that turned Goldman into an activist. She moved to New York City, immersed herself in the anarchist movement, and formed a lifelong partnership with Alexander Berkman, a fellow anarchist. In 1892, Berkman attempted to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead Steel Strike; Goldman was implicated in the plot though not charged. Berkman served fourteen years in prison.
Goldman became a tireless lecturer, travelling constantly throughout the United States, speaking on anarchism, labour rights, literature (she was a passionate advocate for Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw), birth control, and the rights of women. She was arrested repeatedly — for inciting riots, for distributing birth control information, for opposing the draft during World War I. In 1919, she and Berkman were deported to Soviet Russia under the Anarchist Exclusion Act.
Russia and Disillusionment
Goldman arrived in Russia full of hope for the Bolshevik revolution and left two years later profoundly disillusioned. My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) documents her growing horror at the authoritarianism, censorship, and violence of the Soviet regime. She witnessed the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, the persecution of anarchists, and the creation of a police state that contradicted everything she believed about human freedom. The book is one of the earliest and most perceptive left-wing critiques of Soviet communism.
Living My Life (1931)
Goldman’s two-volume autobiography — written in exile in the south of France — is one of the great nonfiction works of the twentieth century. It covers her childhood, her emigration, her political awakening, her relationships (she was a passionate and sexually liberated woman who had numerous lovers, including Berkman, the physician Ben Reitman, and many others), her lectures, her imprisonments, her deportation, and her years of exile.
The book is remarkable for its narrative energy, its emotional honesty, and its refusal to separate the personal from the political. Goldman writes about love affairs and about political theory with equal passion and specificity. She is unreliable in some details — she sometimes exaggerates her own role in events — but the overall portrait is vivid, compelling, and deeply human.
Ideas
Goldman’s anarchism was individualist rather than collectivist: she believed in the absolute sovereignty of the individual over state, church, and social convention. She was an early advocate of birth control (she was arrested in 1916 for distributing contraceptive information, a decade before Margaret Sanger’s more famous campaigns), an advocate for homosexual rights (decades before the modern gay rights movement), and a passionate defender of free speech.
Her essays — collected in Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) — remain readable and relevant, particularly “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation” (which argues that political equality without personal freedom is meaningless) and “Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty.”
Collecting Goldman
Anarchism and Other Essays (1910, Mother Earth Publishing Association) in first edition brings $200–$800. Living My Life (1931, Knopf, two volumes) brings $100–$400. My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) brings $50–$200. Goldman ephemera — pamphlets, broadsides, Mother Earth magazine issues — is collected as political Americana.