Emma Goldman: Feminist, Anarchist, Social Reformer; Educational Posters, Books, Links for Learning |
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social studies> EMMA GOLDMAN < notable women |
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Educational posters celebrating feminist, anarchist and social reformer Emma Goldman include the Women Who Dared I composite poster and related Images of Labor series. |
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“If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.” Emma Goldman, who has a significant place in securing freedom of speech in the United States, was born in Lithuania on 27th June, 1869, to the petit-bourgeois Jewish family of Taube Bienowitch and Abraham Goldman. The family suffered from the social and political persecution of anti-Semitism and in 1881 they moved to St. Petersburg where 12 year old Emma was exposed to the possiblity that there could be a new order to society. Reading What Is to Be Done by Chernishevsky excited her and gave her the heroine of a political organizer and cooperative worker to model. Through family connections in Germany Emma had hopes of getting an education, but those were dashed when she chaffed under the routinization of the Gymnasium. Emma finally emigrated to the United States with her sister Helena in 1885 to escape an arranged marriage. Despite high hopes the United States did not hold better fortunes for Emma. She found work in a sweatshop as a seamtress like so many other East European immigrants, under conditions that were harsh and demeaning. Workers were beginning to organize into unions to protect themselves in the industrialization of America. The 1886 Chicago Haymarket Rally and its consequences lead Emma to commit herself to the anarchist cause of achieving individual liberty and social equality for the working class through the abolition of authority. Goldman was a prolific writer and speaker, constantly drawing attention to her ideas for women’s equality with sexual freedom and birth control, freedom of thought and expression, and worker’s rights for an eight hour day and union organizing. These ideas were considered subversive and she was arrested and sentenced to jail numerous time. Goldman was friends with Johann Most, the editor of a German language anarchist paper. Most made Goldman his protégé and launched her speaking career. The United States government eventually revoked her citizenship and she was deported to the Soviet Union in 1919. She found the Soviet revolution brutal and disillusioned with their authoritarian rule, and fled after two years. Emma Goldman spent the last 20 years of her life actively working for civil liberties and the spiritual freedom of the individual as she traveled through Europe and Canada. She died May 14, 1940 in Toronto, Canada. Read more about Emma GoldmanLiving My Life by Emma Goldman - At the turn of the 20th century, Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was probably the most hated woman in her adopted country. (She emigrated from Russia at age 17.) It was bad enough that she was an anarchist, accused of complicity in the 1901 assassination of President McKinley. But her vehement espousal of women’s rights – including birth control – really enraged upright citizens. Goldman’s marvelously militant autobiography gives ample evidence of her gift for bearing a grudge and inability to mince words – she decries fellow leftists at least as often as the bourgeoisie, especially after she is deported to the Soviet Union in 1919 and discovers that the Bolshevik Revolution is not what she hoped for. But Goldman’s blazing honesty and unflinching commitment to unpopular causes make her a larger-than-life heroine. She does display the occasional human weakness, including a lengthy romance with a man whose infidelities torment this advocate of free love, but they're less interesting than her heroic challenge to America to live up to its ideals. Whether or not she was literally a bomb thrower remains a matter of debate. For posterity, her words are incendiary enough. Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth by Peter Glassgold - The first anthology to draw from the pages of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, America’s groundbreaking radical magazine In March 1906, Emma Goldman published the first issue of Mother Earth, a "Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature." Conceived as a forum for anarchists of every school and variety, Mother Earth laid the groundwork for American radical thought. It did more than report on the contemporary scene-it was part of the action-and its preoccupations preoccupy us still: birth control, women’s rights, civil liberties, and questions of social and economic justice. Mother Earth appeared without interruption until August 1917, when it was killed by wartime postal censorship. Though Emma Goldman has since become a legendary figure, scarcely any material from her magazine has remained in print. This Mother Earth reader sets right this great wrong, and restores to public memory an important body of work-provocative writings by Margaret Sanger, Alexander Kropotkin, and dozens of other radical thinkers of the early twentieth century. LINKS FOR LEARNING : EMMA GOLDMAN |
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