Emma Goldman the legendary writer, feminist and anarchist was born on this day the 27th of June 1869 into a Jewish ghetto in Kovna, a western corner of the Russian Empire. Due to her gender religion, and her family’s lack of resources, the course of her life seemed preordained —marriage, toil, children, an early death. Higher education was a luxury that her family deemed unnecessary; her father told her that “all a Jewish daughter needs to know is how to prepare gefilte fish, cut noodles fine, and give the man plenty of children.” As a Jewish woman in Tsarist Russia her life was perpetually under threat; a rash of bloody pogroms broke out in 1881, and she bore witness the violent antisemitism that continued to plague her homeland after she emigrated to the States in 1885 at age 16 in search of freedom.
Though she had already been exposed to leftist politics by fellow workers at her factory job in Rochester, the 1886 Haymarket affairhttps://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2017/05/haymarket-square-riot-anniversary.html and ensuing state execution of the anarchists Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, and August Spies became the crucible in which Goldman’s radicalization and ongoing political self-education was forged. “I saw a new world opening before me,” she wrote then, and as she wrote in a 1910 essay, “Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive”
Around this time, Goldman came into contact with another anarchist, Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend. The two worked together and in 1892, they were both outraged by an incident in Pittsburgh. Striking men at the Homestead factory of Carnegie Steel had been repressed to such an extent that some had actually been killed.
With funding from Goldman, Berkman bought a gun and used it to shoot Carnegie Steel”s manager, Henry Clay Frick. The attempt to assassinate him failed, although Frick was seriously wounded. Berkman received a life sentence for his act and the federal government attempted to stamp out anarchism. It it became her life’s work to spread the message of liberation far and wide. Convinced that the political and economic organization of modern society was fundamentally unjust, she embraced anarchism for the vision it offered of liberty, harmony and true social justice. For decades, she struggled tirelessly against widespread inequality, repression and exploitation.
By 1893, laws had been enacted that made anarchist speech itself a crime. Goldman ignored them, stating that women could never be prevented from talking by the government, and as a result she was imprisoned. After her release in 1895, she dropped the most extreme of her views, such as support for assassination and general strikes.
Instead, she called for a “revolution in morality,” by which she meant that a struggle needed to be joined against religious and racial prejudice and intolerance. She served prison terms for such activities as advising the unemployed to take bread if their pleas for food were not answered, for giving information in a lecture on birth control, and for opposing military conscription, this led to an eighteen-month imprisonment before the First World War for encouraging Americans not to register for the draft. Described by authorities as 'one of the most dangerous women in America,' she was deported to Russia in 1919, by this time the Communist revolution had taken place and Goldman fully expected to experience the “workers paradise” she had heard so much about. Instead, she discovered not only repression, but also an unpleasantly anti-Semitic atmosphere. Goldman criticized the undemocratic nature of Lenin”s rule and became increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet state. In the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion she denounced the Soviet Union for it's violent repression of independent voices.
She moved to Europe, and travelled and lectured in many countries. She came to Wales, Emma's itinerary of speaking dates during her stay in the UK shows that the most extensively toured area was the south Wales coalfield. During two weeks in 1925 she spoke to audiences from Swansea to the Rhondda, commenting in her letters that the coalfield was a "splendid field" to spread anarchist ideas. As an orator Emma Goldman was fiery and brilliant, drawing crowds of thousands to hear her speak. She is known for her extraordinary energy and appetite for life.
Goldman’s openness brought an altogether human element to the sometimes inflexible realm of radical ideological thought. For her, life was about roses as well as bread. She is remembered as an earthy, bohemian woman who loved art, music, and sex, and saw no reason for a revolutionary to deprive themselves of beautiful things." I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful things," so said Red Emma, without adjectives, who sought a way of being free, who would rather roses on her table, than diamonds on her neck. Who simply chose to cling on throughout her life to her deep ideals,a beautiful ideal for a better world. She told us " Ask for work, if they don't give you work, ask for bread . If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread." This attitude gave rise to one of the most popular quotes attributed to her: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.”
When she was 67 and living in London, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and she threw herself into the cause, mustering support for its anti-fascist International Brigades in their battle against General Franco's Nationalist troops who were supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and sharing her admiration for what she saw as the only working class revolution to have been fomented on anarchist ideals, subsequently backing the Spanish anarchists, as they tried to restructure society with one hand, while battling fascist, Stalinist threats lined up against them on the other.
Goldman’s openness brought an altogether human element to the sometimes inflexible realm of radical ideological thought. For her, life was about roses as well as bread. She is remembered as an earthy, bohemian woman who loved art, music, and sex, and saw no reason for a revolutionary to deprive themselves of beautiful things." I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful things," so said Red Emma, without adjectives, who sought a way of being free, who would rather roses on her table, than diamonds on her neck. Who simply chose to cling on throughout her life to her deep ideals,a beautiful ideal for a better world. She told us " Ask for work, if they don't give you work, ask for bread . If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread." This attitude gave rise to one of the most popular quotes attributed to her: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.” In her autobiography Living My Life (1931) she describes how she was once admonished for dancing at a party in New York and was told “that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway.” Goldman speaks furiously on the occasion here;
“I became alive once more. At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause .I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal” I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it.” This episode was later paraphrased and transformed into the famous quote.
Goldman’s biographer and feminist writer Alix Shulman explained that in 1973, he befriended printer who asked him for a quotation by Goldman for use on a t-shirt. Shulman sent him the passage from Goldman’s autobiography, but the printer rephrased the passage into the famous quote “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution”. As Shulman recounts, the citation subsequently found its way onto millions of buttons, posters, T-shirts, bumper stickers, books and articles: I still think it's lovely when I wake to know where the sentiment and quote that greets me in the bathroom actually derives from.
Goldman was arrested a number of times throughout her life for “offenses” like distributing information on birth control, encouraging men to avoid registering for the draft, and for espionage. She remained fearless, even after a lifetime of constant government surveillance, and repression.
During the final year of her life, Goldman”s were nomadic: she called herself a “woman with no country.” She was equally forthright in her objections to all kinds of totalitarian rule, whether they came from Stalin, Hitler, or Franco. As the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany became more and more extreme during the late 1930s, Goldman wrote about her Jewishness. in 1939, Goldman moved to Toronto, where she organized on behalf of Spanish women and children refugees fleeing victorious dictator Franco Before her death, Mariano Vázquez, the former Secretary-General of the CNT-FAI, a Spanish anarchist organization, sent her a message naming her as “our spiritual mother.” Even as her own health failed, her last thoughts were with the oppressed working class, and her final actions were to do what she could to leave a better world behind. She died in Toronto in May of 1940 after suffering from a series of strokes. She was 70 years old.
After her death, Goldman’s life and work received little attention until anarcho-feminists in the 1960’s revived interest in her writings and thus reignited her spirit of resistance. Anarcho-punks in the 1980’s and 1990’s and anti-capitalist activists of the new millennium kept Red Emma’s legacy alive, referencing her in song and counter-culture, naming infoshops and collective projects in her honor around the world.
Today as I celebrate Emma Goldman's birthday she is warmly remembered for the anarcho-feminist, anti-militarist and internationalist contributions she made to the social revolutionary struggles in life. She once famously declared that “Everyone is an anarchist who loves liberty and hates oppression" In troubling times, her words and deeds continue to inspire as we come together and believe in better days. Beyond the panic of our current predicaments and journeys their our those who will keep on fighting for a fairer society, that continue to champion her pursuit of universal justice towards a more humane, fair and fulfilling world. Her dream lives on and the struggle continues for a better world.
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