Emma Goldman

From Philosopedia

Goldman, Emma (27 June 1869 - 14 May 1940)

Goldman, a Lithuanian-born anarchist and communist, grew up in a Jewish family in Kaunas, Lithuania, a country which then was part of Russia. Her family owned a small inn and moved when she was thirteen to St. Petersburg at a time of political represssion after the assassination of Alexander II. When 17, she immigrated with her sister Helene to Rochester, New York, to live with her sister Lena.

Still a teenager, she married fellow factory worker Jacob Kerhner. But when four anarchists were hanged during the Haymarket Riot, she left her marriage and family to join the anarchist movement.

An anarchist, an advocate of birth control, and a freethinker, Goldman believed that each generation needs to discard “the burdens of the past, which hold us all in a net.”

In 1893 she was jailed for inciting a riot by publicly urging unemployed workers to "Ask for work. If they do not give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, take bread." While in jail, she developed her interest in nursing. According to a warden, women worshipped her as if she were an idol, for she nursed them and fought for their rights. She had been jailed for advocating that "Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open."

Goldman was imprisoned numerous times, once for conspiracy to assassinate President McKinley (she was released after authorities were unable to connect her with Leon Czolgosz), once for distributing birth control literature, and once for conspiring to obstruct the World War I draft.

In 1919 at the age of 50, she was deported through the efforts of J. Edgar Hoover. Upon becoming thoroughly disillusioned with Bolshevism, she became a British citizen in 1925. She wrote her autobiography in 1931. Her two essays, "The Failure of Christianity" (1913) and "The Philosophy of Atheism" (1916) contain her freethought views. In 1936 she went to Spain to support the revoution against Francisco Franco's fascism.

A major unbeliever, she was as unbelieving of Christianity as she became of the Russian Revolution, after having been deported from the United States to Russia after having obstructed the draft. “Religion is a superstition that originated in man’s inability to solve natural phenomena,” she wrote. “The Church is an organized institution that has always been a stumbling block to progress.”

In an 1898 speech to a liberal Detroit congregation, she said,

• I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years been working to undo the botched job your god has made. There are . . . some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and Bigotry - the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth.

Goldman insisted upon the libertarian principle that “liberty is the mother of order, not its daughter,” that this constitutes the highest wisdom yet developed. As such, she condemned the Bolshevik state as she had condemned the soulless church for its “cold, inhuman authoritarianism,” wrote William O. Reichert.

Gay historians Jonathan Katz, Adrien Saks, and Lynne Yamnaguchi Fletcher imply that letters from Almeda Sperry to Goldman were of a lesbian nature.

In Toronto in 1940, she died of a stroke. Her body was allowed to be brought back for burial in Forest Park, Illinois, near where the executed Haymarket Riot defendants are interred. Her tombstone reads:

• Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to Liberty.

{CE; EU, William O. Reichert; FFRF; TYD; WWS}