Emma Goldman - a true anarchist
This International Women’s Day we’d like to acknowledge Emma Goldman, the radical anarchist immigrant who fought against the tyranny of capitalism and promoted full equality for women.
Emma Goldman was born on June 27, 1869 in Kovno, Lithuania. Harsh restrictions on Jewish mobility and economic activity made it almost impossible for many Jews, including the Goldmans, to escape poverty. Emma had a difficult childhood. Her father was violent and abusive and her mother struggled with depression.
Emma moved with her family to St. Petersburg, Russia, when she was 12 years old. It was there that she first encountered the growing revolutionary movement in Russia and got her first taste of political radicalism. Soon after, however, she moved to Germany to live with her grandmother and attend school. After only four years in the school, 16-year-old Emma returned to Russia to go to work as a seamstress in a corset factory. In 1885, her father sought to arrange a marriage for her. She fled the match and her abusive father by immigrating with her sister to the United States.
The sisters settled in Rochester, New York, and found work in a garment factory. Emma’s interest in political radicalism only grew with her experience as a laborer in the United States. The long hours, unequal pay, and suppression of workers’ rights added fuel to a growing fire within the young activist and agitator.
While in Rochester, Emma married a young Jewish immigrant and naturalized citizen named Jacob Kerschner. The marriage lasted less than a year, as Emma quickly realized she wanted more than a married life in a small city. By the age of 20, she was divorced and living in New York City.
Emma was particularly drawn to the idea of anarchism. She believed that human nature was inherently good and that people would naturally organize communities around common interests. She saw government systems as creating unnecessary competition among well-meaning individuals. Anarchists also believed that with the destruction of the capitalist-driven government, everyone would be equal regardless of gender or race. Emma, however, departed from this part of the ideology. She argued that women needed to advocate for their emancipation from men. It was this belief that made her a specific champion of women’s rights.
In 1892, Emma’s reputation as a violent and infamous radical took shape when she and her partner Alexander Berkman plotted to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick. Emma and Alexander were outraged by Frick’s violent treatment of steel mill strikers in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Alexander shot Frick in Frick’s office. Although Frick survived, Alexander was sentenced to twenty-two years in jail for attempted assassination. Emma was arrested, but avoided jail time because there was not enough evidence to prove she had been involved in the plot.
In the years that followed, Emma built a career and reputation as an anarchist agitator. She spoke on street corners and at mass meetings, attended radical discussion groups, and built connections among the bohemian circle of Greenwich Village. In 1906, she launched the magazine Mother Earth, which featured articles on politics, anarchism, free love, birth control, and feminist ideologies.
Emma’s combination of feminism and anarchism made her a truly unique thinker among the reformers of her era. She criticized what she saw as a narrow, misguided view of women’s rights. She was wary of the suffrage movement because she believed that participation in politics was participation in a corrupt system that promoted inequality; women could vote just as unjustly as men. There was no guarantee, she argued, that women voters would fix political corruption.
Instead, Emma wanted women to turn their attention to issues beyond suffrage. She trained as a nurse and midwife. She was often arrested for promoting birth control publicly and breaking other decency laws of the time.
