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.