Emma Goldman

Russian-American anarchist writer and activist (1869–1940), born in Kaunas, in present-day Lithuania, into a Jewish family, who emigrated to the United States in 1885 fleeing poverty and antisemitic persecution, where she worked in textile factories before joining New York's anarchist circles following the execution of the Haymarket anarchists in 1887, an event that decisively radicalised her politically. Lifelong romantic partner and political collaborator of Alexander Berkman, with whom she planned the 1892 attempted assassination of industrialist Henry Clay Frick in reprisal for the suppression of the Homestead strike, Goldman became one of the most famous and controversial public speakers in the United States, arrested on numerous occasions for incitement to riot and for her public advocacy of birth control, then illegal. Founder and editor of the influential anarchist magazine Mother Earth (1906–1917), she developed an original brand of anarchism combining a radical critique of capitalism and the state with a pioneering defence of sexual and gender liberation, the right to abortion and contraception, and individual freedom against any form of collective coercion, including that of the organised labour movement itself when it turned dogmatic. Deported from the United States in 1919 alongside Berkman for her opposition to World War I and compulsory conscription, she experienced initial enthusiasm and later profound disillusionment with the Russian Revolution, recounted starkly in her book My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) after witnessing the Bolshevik repression of anarchists and the Kronstadt revolt. She fought fascism during the Spanish Civil War, where she actively supported the anarcho-syndicalist CNT-FAI. Her autobiography, Living My Life (1931), is regarded as one of the great testimonies of twentieth-century political radicalism, and her figure has since been reclaimed as a pioneer of both anarchism and modern feminism.

16 works

• A fragment of the prison experiences of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman
• Address to the Jury in U.S. v. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman
• Anarchism and Other Essays
• Anarchy and the Sex Question
• Anarchy Defended by Anarchists
• Deportation, its meaning and menace
• Down With the Anarchists!
• Durruti is Dead, Yet Living
• Marriage and Love
• My Disillusionment in Russia
• My further disillusionment in Russia
• The Child and its Enemies
• The Individual, Society and the State
• The place of the individual in society
• The Social Significance of the Modern Drama
• There is No Communism in Russia