Emma Goldman - Infinite Women

Born: 27 June 1869, Lithuania
Died: 14 May 1940
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA

The following bio was written by Emma Rosen, author of On This Day She Made History: 366 Days With Women Who Shaped the World and This Day In Human Ingenuity & Discovery: 366 Days of Scientific Milestones with Women in the Spotlight, and has been republished with permission.

Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 – May 14, 1940) was a Russian-born Jewish anarchist, political activist, and writer. She greatly influenced anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe during the first half of the 20th century.
Born in Kaunas, Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire), she moved to the United States in 1885. Inspired by the Chicago Haymarket affair, Goldman became a prominent writer and speaker on anarchist philosophy, women’s rights, and social issues, drawing large audiences. Alongside Alexander Berkman, an anarchist writer, and her partner, she planned to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick as a symbolic action. Frick survived, Berkman was imprisoned, and Goldman faced several arrests for “inciting to riot” and distributing birth control information. In 1906, she founded the anarchist journal “Mother Earth.”
Goldman and Berkman were jailed in 1917 for conspiring against the draft, and after release, they were caught up in the Palmer Raids during the First Red Scare. Deported to Russia in 1919, they initially supported the Bolsheviks but later criticized them for suppressing dissent. Leaving Russia, Goldman wrote “My Disillusionment in Russia” in 1923. Living in England, Canada, and France, she penned her autobiography “Living My Life” in 1931 and 1935. She went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War to support the anarchist cause and died in Toronto in 1940 at 70.
Goldman was both praised as a pioneering “rebel woman” and criticized for advocating violence. Her writings covered prisons, atheism, free speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Though not aligned with early feminism, she integrated gender politics into anarchism. In the 1970s, renewed interest in her life arose among feminist and anarchist scholars, reviving her legacy.

The following is republished from the Library of Congress. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).

Emma Goldman, American anarchist and feminist, advocate of free speech, birth control, and the eight-hour work day, was arrested in New York City on February 11, 1916—just prior to giving another public lecture on family planning. She was charged with violating the Comstock Act, an 1873 law banning transportation of “obscene” matter through the mail or across state lines. At the time, federal courts interpreted the act as prohibiting distribution of information about contraception.

“[W]hen a law has outgrown time and necessity, it must go and the only way to get rid of the law, is to awaken the public to the fact that it has outlived its purposes and that is precisely what I have been doing and mean to do in the future.”
Emma Goldman to “the Press,” February 15, 1916. The Emma Goldman Papers

Goldman was born on June 27, 1869, in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire; by the time she was twelve, her family had moved to St. Petersburg. Like most Eastern European Jews, Goldman’s family suffered under the political oppression and anti-Semitism of Imperial Russia. She fled Russia with her sister Helena in 1885, settling in Rochester, New York, where they were soon joined by the rest of their family.

In Rochester, Goldman worked in a garment factory and was briefly married to a fellow laborer and Russian immigrant. Disillusioned with working conditions, she quickly became energized by the growing labor movement. Her acceptance of anarchism–the belief that any form of government is unnecessary and undesirable–grew from the persecution of anarchists and labor leaders during the Haymarket Affair of 1886-87. Following labor protests in Chicago that turned violent, eight anarchists were convicted of bomb throwing without hard evidence, based on the radical content of their writings and speeches; four of the eight were hanged amid broad public outrage. The designation of May Day (May 1) as an international labor holiday commemorated the Haymarket tragedy.

By 1889, Goldman had moved to New York City. Her abilities as a speaker and writer contributed to her prominence among an international group of political radicals. In the 1890s, Goldman worked as a nurse and a midwife among poor immigrants in New York City’s Lower East Side. She campaigned for legalized birth control, believing that contraception was essential to women’s social, sexual, and economic freedom. Emma Goldman was arrested twice (1915 and 1916) and imprisoned once (1916) for lecturing and distributing material in support of birth control.

Goldman was also, in these years, involved in a variety of anarchist activities, ranging from direct actions to lectures to publications such as her Anarchism and Other Essays of 1910. As a co-founder of the No-Conscription LeagueExternal in 1917 Goldman was again arrested—this time for speaking against the selective draft law. After two years in prison in Missouri, she was deported to Russia in 1919 along with several hundred other radical immigrants. Goldman lived and worked in Russia until 1921, when she left, disillusioned with the Russian Revolution.

Exiled from the United States, Emma Goldman traveled through Europe, delivering lectures as an advocate of anarchism and individual freedom. She lived for a time in St. Tropez, France, where she wrote her memoir, Living My Life of 1931; and in Toronto, Canada, where she died in 1940. Though banned in her lifetime, Emma Goldman returned to the United States for her final resting place: she is buried in a Chicago cemetery near the monument erected for the Haymarket Martyrs.