Emma Goldman Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was an anarchist, socialist activist, speaker, and writer born in Lithuania (then part of the Russian empire) and active in the United States, Soviet Union, and several Western European countries.

Goldman worked in the garment industry in St. Petersburg and, after emigrating in 1885, in Rochester, New York, where she married Jacob Kershner and became a U.S. citizen. Inspired by the story of the 1886 Haymarket tragedy, in which labor strikers and police clashed and several people were killed, she became an anarchist through self-study. After leaving her husband, Goldman moved to New York City in 1889, where she first worked with Johan Most and then, after her views diverged from Most’s, she studied the works of Pyotr Kropotkin. During these years, Goldman entered into a political and romantic relationship with fellow anarchist Alexander Berkman, whom she defended after he was imprisoned for the attempted assassination of industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892.

Goldman lectured widely, at political demonstrations as well as in lecture halls, advocating socialism, anarchism, absolute freedom of the individual, modern drama, and free love. She played a major role in making the freedom and gender equality of women part of generally accepted anarchist principles. She applied these standards to her own life, having long-term liaisons with Ben Reitman and possibly Hippolyte Havel as well as with Berkman.

After Berkman’s release from prison, he and Goldman published a monthly journal, Mother Earth, from 1906 to 1917, when its offices were raided by government agents and its subscription lists seized under the provisions of the Espionage Act. During this period Goldman’s major essays were collected in Anarchism and Other Essays (1911).

Goldman was imprisoned from 1893 to 1895 for inciting to riot after she led a march of 1,000 people to Union Square in support of free bread for hungry workers. She was imprisoned twice more, in 1916 for distributing birth control literature and in 1917 for obstructing the draft. Her U.S. citizenship was revoked in 1908, and she and Berkman were deported to the Soviet Union in 1919 during the Palmer Raids.

Goldman had hoped to find a land ruled by workers in the Soviet Union, but she became a strong critic of the lack of personal freedom under Communist rule. She left the Soviet Union after two years and published her opinions in two volumes, My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and My Further Disillusionment in Russia (1924). Her two-volume autobiography, Living My Life (1931, 1934), is an important statement of her views as well as a memoir of her activities through 1927. Her other major book, The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914), is a collection of essays on thirty-two plays by nineteen European playwrights, including Anton Chekov, John Galsworthy, Gerhart Hauptmann, Henrik Ibsen, Maurice Maeterlinck, George Bernard Shaw, August Strindberg, Leo Tolstoy, and William Butler Yeats; this volume helped to popularize modern drama in the United States.

In 1925, Goldman married Welshman James Colton in order to acquire a British passport so that she could travel freely in Europe and visit the United States. She went to Spain in 1936 to support the antifascist struggle and affiliated with the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (CNT-FAI) in Barcelona, publishing an English-language bulletin for them and then serving as their representative in London. She died in Toronto in 1940 and was buried in the Waldheim cemetery in Chicago, Illinois, near the graves of the Haymarket martyrs.

Bibliography:

Beck, Frank O. Hobohemia: Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman & Other Agitators & Outsiders in 1920/30s Chicago. Rindge, N.H., R. R. Smith, 1956.
Chalberg, John C. Emma Goldman: American Individualist. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008.
Falk, Candace Serena. Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Goldman, Emma. Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth. Edited and with commentary by Peter Glassgold. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001.
Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution. Edited by David Porter. Oakland, Ca.: AK Press, 2006.
Wexler, Alice. Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

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