GOLDMAN, EMMA

(1869-1940), anarchist and feminist. Opponent of established authority, war, and totalitarian government, Emma Goldman was the most famous rebel of her day. A passionate activist andcharismatic speaker, she committed her life to radical causes in Europe and America. Born in a Jewish ghetto in Lithuania, Goldman immigrated to the United States when she was sixteen. Reared in a Jewish tradition of prophecy and opposition to injustice, her early experience molded by Russian anti-Semitism and reading in Russian nihilist literature, Goldman was destined to become a critic of her newly adopted country, just as she was of the Old World she left behind. But it was the hanging in 1887 of four Chicago anarchists accused of murdering policemen in the Haymarket affair that led her to dedicate her life to political radicalism.

A sewing machine operator in a corset factory, she concluded that she and other workers were exploited by factory owners. She was attracted to anarchism not only because it promised to replace capitalism with worker cooperatives but because anarchism espoused atheism, free speech, and freedom from sexual inhibition. Like many other anarchists of her day, Goldman also flirted with the idea of political violence. During the Homestead strike of 1892 she helped her lover, Alexander Berkman, plan the attempted assassination of steel mill owner Henry Clay Frick. A year later Goldman spent a year in prison for telling unemployed workers to steal bread if they had to. She was also implicated in President William McKinley's assassination.

From 1908 to 1917 Goldman spoke throughout the United States on behalf of the anarchist cause and edited the anarchist journal Mother Earth until 1916. Through her lectures and writing, she helped introduce American audiences to Henrik Ibsen, Bernard Shaw, August Strindberg, and other European playwrights, whom she admired for their advanced social ideas and spirit of rebellion.

Goldman believed that birth control would alleviate human misery by reducing the burden of large families on the poor and giving women of all classes sexual freedom. She was a pioneer lecturer on the subject. The decision not to bear children was a woman's right, she argued, and women should have the means to prevent conception. Having practiced as a midwife and a nurse, and attended a conference in Paris where condoms, douches, and diaphragms were discussed frankly, Goldman was familiar with modern birth-control methods. In 1916 she was arrested for violating a law that forbade giving out information about contraceptives. Goldman also advocated "free love," defined as a spiritual as well as sexual union between two people outside the bounds of matrimony, for marriage, she believed, made women lifelong dependents and sexual objects. To many Goldman embodied the "New Woman"—independent, unmarried, and sexually emancipated.

During World War I, Goldman was arrested and sent to prison for having organized an anticonscription campaign. Afterward, along with other anarchists, she was deported to Russia in 1919. Although an early supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, Goldman became disillusioned with party rule and the suppression of free speech she encountered there. Her book, My Disillusionment with Russia (1923), was one of the first serious critiques of the Soviet system. She left Russia and spent the rest of her life in Europe and Canada. In the 1930s she made three trips to Catalonia during the Spanish civil war and enlisted support in England on behalf of the Spanish Republic.

Richard Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman (1976); Candace Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman (1984).

Elizabeth H. Pleck

See also Birth Control; Conscientious Objection; Expatriates and Exiles; Radicalism.