Emma Goldman

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Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 – May 14, 1940) was a Lithuanian-born anarcho-communist known for her anarchist writings and speeches. Adopted by Second-wave feminists, she has been lionized as an iconic "rebel woman" feminist. Goldman played a pivotal role in the development of anarchism in the US and Europe throughout the first half of the twentieth century. She immigrated to the United States at seventeen and was later deported to Russia, where she witnessed the results of the Russian Revolution. She spent a number of years in the South of France where she wrote her autobiography, Living My Life, and other works, before taking part in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 as the English language representative in London of the CNT-FAI.

Contents

Birth and early years

Emma Goldman grew up in a petit-bourgeois Jewish family in Kaunas, Lithuania (then under the control of Russia, and called Kovno by the Russians), where her family ran a small inn. In the period of political repression after the assassination of Alexander II, she moved with her family to St Petersburg at the age of thirteen. There, after a revolutionary sentiment had spread across the area, she decided to work in a factory as a corset maker. It was in that workplace that Goldman was introduced to revolutionary ideas; she obtained a copy of Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done, which sowed the seeds for her anarchist ideas and her independent attitude.

Immigration to America

At the age of 17 she emigrated with her elder sister, Helene, to Rochester, New York, to live with their sister Lena. Goldman worked for several years in a textile factory, and in 1887 married fellow factory worker Jacob Kersner. The hanging of four anarchists after the Haymarket Riot drew the young Emma Goldman to the anarchist movement, and at twenty she became a revolutionary. Following the uproar over the hanging, Goldman left her marriage and her family and traveled to New Haven, Connecticut, and then to New York City. Goldman and Kersner remained legally married, allowing her to retain her American citizenship.

Goldman and Alexander Berkman

New York City

In New York City she met and lived with Alexander Berkman, who was an important figure of the anarchist movement in the United States at the time. Her defense of Berkman's attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick in July 1892 made her highly unpopular with the authorities. Berkman (or Sasha as she fondly referred to him) was jailed for fourteen years, and was released from prison in 1906.

She also become friends with Hippolyte Havel at this time.

Prison

She was imprisoned in 1893 at Blackwell's Island penitentiary for publicly urging unemployed workers that they should "Ask for work. If they do not give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, take bread." (The statement is a summary of the principle of expropriation advocated by anarchist communists like Peter Kropotkin.) She was convicted of "inciting a riot" by a criminal court of New York, despite the testimonies of twelve witnesses in her defense. The jury based their verdict on the testimony of one individual, a Detective Jacobs. Voltairine de Cleyre gave the lecture In Defense of Emma Goldman as a response to this imprisonment. While serving the one year sentence, she developed a keen interest in nursing.

Conspiracy to assassinate the President

She was arrested in Chicago, with nine others, on September 10, 1901, on charges of conspiracy to assassinate President McKinley. Leon Czolgosz, a reclusive anarchist sympathizer, had shot the President several days before. The authorities' attempt to associate her and the other nine anarchists, including Abe and Mary Isaak, with the death of McKinley had an ideological purpose: to discredit Anarchism as much as possible due to its ties with the surging labor movement of the early 1900's. She was one of its fiercest organizers, and had already achieved public notoriety by the time of the accusations. Goldman was released on September 24 after authorities were unable to find any evidence connecting her and the others with Czolgosz's actions. Goldman had met Czolgosz only once, briefly, several weeks before, where he had asked Goldman's advice on a course of study in anarchist ideas. Leon Czolgosz was found guilty of murder and executed.

Birth control

On February 11, 1916, she was arrested and imprisoned again for her distribution of birth control literature. She, like many contemporary feminists, saw abortion as a tragic consequence of social conditions. In 1911, Goldman wrote in Mother Earth:

"The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief...So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies."
Emma Goldman, 1917

World War I

Her third imprisonment was in 1917, this time for conspiring to obstruct the draft: Berkman and Goldman were both involved in setting up No Conscription leagues and organising rallies against World War I.(illustration, right) She was imprisoned for two years, after which she was deported to Russia. At her deportation hearing, J. Edgar Hoover, directing the hearing, called her "one of the most dangerous anarchists in America."

Deportation

This deportation meant that Goldman, with Berkman, was able to witness the Russian Revolution first hand. On her arrival in Russia, she was prepared to support the Bolsheviks despite the split between anarchists and statist communists at the First International. But seeing the political repression, bureaucracy and forced labour in Russia led Goldman to write My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia. She was also devastated by the massive destruction and death resulting from the Russian Civil War. Goldman was friends with Communists and New Yorkers John Reed and Louise Bryant, both of whom were also in Russia at this time (during a period when it was impossible to leave the country); they may even have shared an apartment (see also the film Reds).

Rejection of violence

Her experiences in Russia helped change her ideas on the use of violence: after the Red Army was used against strikers, Goldman began rejecting violence except in self-defense.

Spanish Civil War

Template:Wikisourcepar In 1936, Goldman went to Spain to support the Spanish Revolution and the fight against Francisco Franco's fascism, known as the Spanish Civil War. During this time she wrote the obituary of the prominent Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti in a piece of vibrant prose entitled Durruti is Dead, Yet Living, which echoes Percy Bysshe Shelley's Adonais.

Death and burial

Emma Goldman died of a stroke in Toronto on May 14, 1940. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service allowed her body to be brought back to the United States, and she was buried in German Waldheim Cemetery (now part of Forest Home Cemetery) in Forest Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, close to where the executed Haymarket Riot defendants are interred [1]. Her tombstone reads "Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to Liberty".

Emma Goldman in fiction

In popular culture

  • Emma Goldman is played in the Warren Beatty film Reds by Maureen Stapleton, who won an Academy Award for the role.
  • Goldman's life is the subject of Howard Zinn's play "Emma"
  • In several of Linda Barnes's novels, her character Carlotta Carlyle owns a parakeet that her late aunt named Fluffy. Carlotta calls her/renames her Red Emma.
  • "If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution" or some variation, a quotation universally attributed to Emma Goldman, has appeared on tens of thousands of t-shirts, buttons, posters, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, hats, and other items. In fact, Goldman never said or wrote the sentence, although the sentiment is consistent with Goldman's insistence that revolutionary anarchism was not inconsistent with pursuits of beauty and the pleasures of life.[1]
  • Red Emma's, a collectively run coffeeshop and bookstore in Baltimore, is named for Emma Goldman.[1] The Emma Center was an infoshop in Minneapolis, and Whose Emma? was an infoshop in Toronto.
  • Emma Goldman's ten year relationship with Ben Reitman is dramatized in the stage play by Lynn Rogoff entitled, Love, Ben Love, Emma. Rogoff, who received the blessing from both estates, has their letters read as monologues at significant junctures in the play.[1]
  • Emma Goldman appears as a fictional character in E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, where she plays an important part in allowing the characters of Evelyn Nesbit and her lover, Younger Brother, to examine their own lives in a new way. The book combines fiction with history. In the musical based on the book, Emma appears as a featured vocalist in two songs, "The Night That Goldman Spoke" and "He Wanted To Say."
  • The name of Emmanuel Goldstein, a character in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, may be a reference to Emma Goldman.
  • The meeting between Emma Goldman and Leon Czolgosz is featured in Sondheim's Broadway musical Assassins.
  • Emma Goldman appears in the 1991 Origin Systems computer RPG Martian Dreams. In the game's alternate reality, Goldman is an ally of the Martian-possessed Grigori Rasputin.
  • Emma Goldman and Leon Czolgosz appear in Rhys Bowen's "Death of Riley". While they are acknowledged to be true historical characters, the rest of the book is fiction.
  • Emma Goldman is the protagonist in an unpublished book called "Red Emma" by Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe. It is illegal to publish the book in Norway, due to a conflict with the author's family.
  • Emma Goldman is featured in "Murder on Marble Row", one of the novels in Victoria Thompson's historical Gaslight mystery series. She is acknowledged as a historical figure in the Author's Note at the end of the novel, although Goldman's role in the plot is fictional.
  • The story of the relationship between Goldman and Berkman is the topic of the Chumbawamba song "When Alexander met Emma" on the album A Singsong and a Scrap. The band used a quote attributed to Goldman in the liner notes of some of their albums, which says "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution."
  • Emma Goldman's arrest for her alleged plot to assassinate President McKinley and her relationship with Alexander Berkman are celebrated in Jessica Litwak's one woman play "Emma Goldman: Love, Anarchy and Other Affairs" published by Applause Books.
  • Emma Goldman inspired Holly Near to write the song "Emma"
  • Emma Goldman is the apparent inspiration behind the Pat Humphreys song "Bound for Freedom".
  • In part one ("Millennium Approaches") of Angels in America by Tony Kushner, Louis says, "My grandmother actually saw Emma Goldman speak. In Yiddish. But all she could remember was that she spoke well and wore a hat".
  • A fictional depiction of Emma Goldman is included in the musical, "Tin Types," which includes a parodied love song swooned between Goldman and Roosevelt.
  • Goldman inspired the song "Emma Goldman" written by Helen Hill and Paul Gailiunas, recorded by the Halifax-based band Piggy on their album "Don't Stop the Calypso." They later rerecorded it with their New Orleans band The Troublemakers on their 2004 album "Here Come the Troublemakers." The song was covered by Anne Feeney on her 2006 album "If I Can't Dance, It's Not My Revolution"
  • In the 2005 movie V for Vendetta, directed by James McTeigue, the freedom fighter/terrorist known only as V says to Evey Hammond: "A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having." This is supposedly in reference to Goldman's famously attributed quote.
  • A quote from Emma Goldman, "Resistance to tyranny is man's highest ideal," was used in The Nightwatchman's music video for "The Road I Must Travel"
  • Emma Goldman's name is invoked in Steve Earle's song, "Christmas in Washington."
  • The band Pretty Girls Make Graves has a song entitled "Modern Day Emma Goldman".
  • The band J Church has a song titled "If I Have To Dance Than I Don't Want Your Revolution".
  • Sophie Ellis-Bextor released the track "If I Can't Dance" on the album "Trip The Light Fantastic" in 2007, featuring the line "If I can't dance, I don't want any part of your revolution"

References

  • Falk, Candace, et al. Emma Goldman: A Documentary History Of The American Years, Volume 1 - Made for America, 1890-1901. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. ISBN 0520086708
  • Falk, Candace, et al. Emma Goldman: A Documentary History Of The American Years, Volume 2 - Making Speech Free, 1902-1909. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. ISBN 0520225694
  • Goldman, Emma. The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation, New York, Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1906,
  • Goldman, Emma. My Disillusionment in Russia. London: C. W. Daniel Co., 1925. ISBN 048643270X
  • Goldman, Emma. Living My Life. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1931. ISBN 0486225437
  • Goldman, Emma. Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution, ed. David Porter. New Paltz, NY: Commonground Press, 1983. ISBN 0961034823
  • Moritz, Theresa. The World's Most Dangerous Woman: A New Biography of Emma Goldman. Vancouver: Subway Books, 2001. ISBN 0968716318

See also

External links

The page was seeded with material from Wikipedia

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