Emma Goldman: The Radical Saint of Resistance
This courageous revolutionary fought for justice her whole life
Some people are born to wealth, others to poverty. Some people are born with a gift for music, or mathematics, or parenting, or athletics. Some people are born to live simple lives. And some people — some people are just born to rebel. Emma Goldman was just such a person. From childhood, she battled oppression and injustice. She even rejected the creeds of left and right, aspiring for a society free to find its own path unhindered by the baggage of history.
Emma Goldman was born in what was then the Russian Empire (and is now Kaunas, Lithuania) in 1869. Her Jewish family was very poor, but from a very early age Emma showed great sensitivity to the suffering of others. Once, as a little girl, she saw an impoverished farmer getting brutally whipped in the street. Peasants had only recently stopped being considered the property of their local aristocratic lords, but were still considered less than human. The incident scarred Emma for life — decades later, she would still refer to it emotionally.
Young Emma craved knowledge and desperately wanted to go to school, but her conservative father refused to allow it. She was expected to get married and have babies and not much else, and she didn’t need education for that. Undaunted, and braving frequent beatings by her father, she still managed to educate herself, voraciously reading every book she could get her hands on. By her early teens she could easily discuss politics, philosophy, even medicine.
When Emma was around twelve, the Czar of Russia, Alexander II, was assassinated by a group of nihilists. These were violent activists who rejected all forms of authority, predecessors to the anarchists Emma would later join. The assassination sparked Emma’s fascination with revolutionary movements, but at the time, she was expected to work full-time for her family. Work she did, as a seamstress, fending of constant sexual harassment from her bosses (this occurred before her 15th birthday). Finally she had a chance to emigrate to the United States, winding up in upstate New York.
Even in America, her father refused to allow her to attend school. It should be noted that at that time, women had essentially no legal rights. Emma was not a citizen, and was legally the property of her father, later tobecome the property of whatever man she married. If her father said no to school, that was it. The vast majority of men and women accepted this state of affairs, but Emma simply couldn’t. Her father actually arranged a marriage for her (to a man who worked at her factory) but it was a loveless, miserable relationship that only lasted a few months. Finally, Emma ran away from home, winding up in New York City. She was only around eighteen.
By her move to New York, Emma was fully radicalized. Just two years earlier, in 1887, was the Haymarket Affair in Chicago. In this incident, a protest by workers turned violent when someone threw a bomb at the police, killing seven officers (and four protesters). The identity of the bomb-thrower remains unknown even to this day, but the police and prosecutors didn’t let that bother them. Seven anarchists were rounded up, and, although even prosecutors admitted they had absolutely nothing to do with the bombing, they were sentenced to death. This cruel injustice sparked a fire of outrage across America and around the world, fueling more radicalism and protests, and Emma was particularly affected.
The things every new generation has to fight, and which it can least overcome, are the burdens of the past … Anarchism, at least as I understand it, leaves posterity free to develop its own particular systems, in harmony with its needs.
— Emma Goldman
What is anarchism? Different people will offer different definitions. Emma Goldman’s definition was fairly clear; far from being a model for a particular political or economic system, she saw it as a path to a newer, freer society without the shackles of the past. After all, no revolution occurs in a vacuum. Even the most devoted revolutionaries are products of the unjust societies that raised them, retaining attitudes on issues like race, gender and economics that are closely linked to the past. To Emma, anarchism meant ensuring a fresh start for society by wiping the old ways clean and starting over from the assumption that all human beings are equal. Whatever form of government sprang from that clean water would by definition be just and fair; the challenge was to create the conditions for such a government. That was the focus of her lifelong efforts.
Anarchism was once very popular, thriving in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Its devotion to real freedom made it the enemy of both right-wing and left-wing activists. Emma, however, wasn’t bothered by this. She hated capitalism but also famously despised the Soviet system founded by Lenin, finding it dark, oppressive and joyless.
Once in New York, she worked as a seamstress while putting her passions toward revolution. She quickly built a network of fellow revolutionaries, particularly a man named Alexander Berkman. The two would remain close for the rest of their lives, sometimes as lovers, sometimes as friends. Emma Goldman was not afraid of violence: early on, she and Berkman worked out a plan to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, a spectacularly wealthy businessman who was at the forefront of violent conflict with workers. The plan was for Berkman to do the killing, knowing he would either die or go to prison for life, while Emma would use the murder to stir up support for their movement.
In the event, the assassination failed, Berkman went to prison and Emma found that, far from serving as a rallying cry, their act of violence offended those it was meant to inspire. It was an important lesson: though she would often be jailed for her beliefs, she never again participated in violent action to further her cause. She stuck to speeches and writing instead.
I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.
— Emma Goldman
Her beliefs were indeed radical, especially for her time. Among her views:
- Capitalism was by its nature incompatible with liberty because it focused on consumption and exploitation
- She opposed voting because it creates the illusion of democracy while supporting the state; the state should be opposed at every turn, not supported through voting
- She was critical of the women’s suffrage movement, because although fully equal to men, women were just as susceptible to corruption and foolishness as men (“As if women can’t be bought!” she said)
- She opposed militarism and war
- She supported free speech and equal rights for all
- She supported the legalization of birth control (still illegal back then)
- She supported abortion rights
- She supported “free love,” which at the time was widely seen as what we would call open marriages — yet she struggled with feelings of jealousy when she practiced it
- Incredibly, she was a strong supporter of gay rights — virtually unheard-of at that time
- She was a proud atheist, viewing religion as a tool for control of individuals
As a speaker she was spellbinding. Even though it would be years before women even had the right to vote, she carried a level of gravitas that could not be denied. She was arrested and jailed more than once — one prosecutor warning jurors, “this is a dangerous woman” — but continued her efforts. Over time, however, she began losing influence while authorities in multiple countries harassed her nonstop for her beliefs. She was deported from the United States in 1919, and tried life in the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France and, eventually, Canada. In the 1920s she became a midwife, delivering babies, largely forgotten.
In the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War became a kind of proxy war for the forces of socialism, nationalism and, widely forgotten now, anarchism. Spain had a thriving anarchist movement, and Emma was invited to Spain to lend her energy to their movement. She was thrilled by what she encountered there: for the first time, anarchists had enough strength to begin putting their beliefs into practice. However the fighting with Franco’s fascists required the anarchists to join forces with Spain’s socialists. Emma was horrified as the anarchists quickly abandoned their beliefs in order to win the war (which they lost). She returned to Toronto, Canada, dying, once again forgotten, in 1940, at the age of 70. Berkman had died four years earlier.
Starting in the 1970s, a new generation of feminists rediscovered the remarkable life and work of Emma Goldman, and once more she returned to the public eye. Memorials began springing up in the United States, while some of her quotes returned to public discourse. Variations of her most famous quote, her dismissal of the Russian Revolution, began appearing on mugs and t-shirts: “If there’s no dancing, count me out.”
Emma Goldman did not live to see success in her revolution, in the sense that anarchism has not served as the foundation to any of the world’s societies. However, she probably did not expect to see such an outcome. Emma was driven to resist. Resist injustice, resist oppression, resist inequality, resist prejudice, whatever the cost to her. Resist. Not merely in service of a specific goal but because resistance is simply what conscience demands. That will forever be Emma Goldman’s legacy: resistance.
