114 Facts About Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman was a Russian-born anarchist, political activist, and writer.

Emma Goldman played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.

Emma Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control.

Emma Goldman left the Soviet Union and in 1923 published a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia.

Emma Goldman died in Toronto, Canada, on May 14,1940, aged 70.

Emma Goldman's writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality.

Emma Goldman was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Kovno in Lithuania, then within the Russian Empire.

Taube's second marriage was arranged by her family and, as Emma Goldman puts it, "mismated from the first".

Emma Goldman's father used violence to punish his children, beating them when they disobeyed him.

Emma Goldman used a whip on Emma, the most rebellious of them.

Emma Goldman's mother provided scarce comfort, rarely calling on Abraham to tone down his beatings.

When Emma Goldman was a young girl, the Goldman family moved to the village of Papile, where her father ran an inn.

At the age of seven, Emma Goldman moved with her family to the Prussian city of Konigsberg, and she was enrolled in a Realschule.

Emma Goldman found a sympathetic mentor in her German-language teacher, who loaned her books and took her to an opera.

Emma Goldman studied the political turmoil around her, particularly the Nihilists responsible for assassinating Alexander II of Russia.

The book enthralled Emma Goldman and remained a source of inspiration throughout her life.

Emma Goldman wanted to join her sister, but their father refused to allow it.

Desperate, Emma Goldman threatened to throw herself into the Neva River if she could not go.

On December 29,1885, Helena and Emma Goldman arrived at New York City's Castle Garden, the entry for immigrants.

Emma Goldman began working as a seamstress, sewing overcoats for more than ten hours a day, earning two and a half dollars a week.

Emma Goldman asked for a raise and was denied; she quit and took work at a smaller shop nearby.

At her new job, Emma Goldman met a fellow worker named Jacob Kershner, who shared her love for books, dancing, and traveling, as well as her frustration with the monotony of factory work.

Meanwhile, Emma Goldman was becoming more engaged with the political turmoil around her, particularly the aftermath of executions related to the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago and the anti-authoritarian political philosophy of anarchism.

Emma Goldman's parents considered her behavior "loose" and refused to allow Goldman into their home.

On her first day in the city, Emma Goldman met two men who greatly changed her life.

Emma Goldman was impressed by his fiery oration, and Most took her under his wing, training her in methods of public speaking.

Excited by the experience, Emma Goldman refined her public persona during subsequent engagements.

Emma Goldman quickly found herself arguing with Most over her independence.

Meanwhile, Emma Goldman had begun a friendship with Berkman, whom she affectionately called Sasha.

In 1892, Emma Goldman joined with Berkman and Stein in opening an ice cream shop in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Berkman chose to carry out the assassination, and ordered Emma Goldman to stay behind in order to explain his motives after he went to jail.

Emma Goldman would be in charge of "the deed"; she of the associated propaganda.

Emma Goldman, meanwhile, decided to help fund the scheme through prostitution.

Emma Goldman wrote to Helena, claiming illness, and asked her for fifteen dollars.

Furious at these attacks, Emma Goldman brought a toy horsewhip to a public lecture and demanded, onstage, that Most explain his betrayal.

Emma Goldman dismissed her, whereupon she struck him with the whip, broke it on her knee, and hurled the pieces at him.

Emma Goldman began speaking to crowds of frustrated men and women in New York City.

Emma Goldman responded by throwing a glass of ice water in his face.

Emma Goldman was sentenced to one year in the Blackwell's Island Penitentiary.

Emma Goldman read dozens of books, including works by the American activist-writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne; poet Walt Whitman, and philosopher John Stuart Mill.

When Emma Goldman was released after ten months, a raucous crowd of nearly 3,000 people greeted her at the Thalia Theater in New York City.

Emma Goldman soon became swamped with requests for interviews and lectures.

Emma Goldman sailed to Europe, lecturing in London, Glasgow, and Edinburgh.

Emma Goldman met with renowned anarchists such as Errico Malatesta, Louise Michel, and Peter Kropotkin.

The authorities used this as a pretext to charge Emma Goldman with planning McKinley's assassination.

Emma Goldman was arrested, along with Isaak, Havel, and ten other anarchists.

Emma Goldman explained her housemates' distrust of Czolgosz, and the police finally recognized that she had not had any significant contact with the attacker.

Emma Goldman was vilified in the press as the "high priestess of anarchy", while many newspapers declared the anarchist movement responsible for the murder.

Emma Goldman had returned to anarchist activism, but it was taking its toll on her.

In 1906, Emma Goldman decided to start a publication, "a place of expression for the young idealists in arts and letters".

Berkman took the helm of Mother Earth in 1907, while Emma Goldman toured the country to raise funds to keep it operating.

Emma Goldman was pained by his rejection of her, but considered it a consequence of his prison experience.

Emma Goldman returned to the US and continued speaking to large audiences.

Emma Goldman tried to reconcile her feelings of jealousy with a belief in freedom of the heart, but found it difficult.

Two years later, Emma Goldman began feeling frustrated with lecture audiences.

Emma Goldman yearned to "reach the few who really want to learn, rather than the many who come to be amused".

Emma Goldman collected a series of speeches and items she had written for Mother Earth and published a book titled Anarchism and Other Essays.

In 1916, Emma Goldman was arrested for giving lessons in public on how to use contraceptives.

In 1915 Emma Goldman conducted a nationwide speaking tour, in part to raise awareness about contraception options.

Emma Goldman saw the decision as an exercise in militarist aggression, driven by capitalism.

Emma Goldman declared in Mother Earth her intent to resist conscription, and to oppose US involvement in the war.

The New York Times reported that Emma Goldman asked to change into a more appropriate outfit, and emerged in a gown of "royal purple".

Emma Goldman met the socialist Kate Richards O'Hare, who had been imprisoned under the Espionage Act.

Emma Goldman met and became friends with Gabriella Segata Antolini, an anarchist and follower of Luigi Galleani.

Emma Goldman had refused to cooperate with authorities, and was sent to prison for 14 months.

At her deportation hearing on October 27,1919 Emma Goldman refused to answer questions about her beliefs, on the grounds that her American citizenship invalidated any attempt to deport her under the Anarchist Exclusion Act, which could be enforced only against non-citizens of the US.

Emma Goldman initially viewed the Bolshevik revolution in a positive light.

Emma Goldman wrote in Mother Earth that despite its dependence on Communist government, it represented "the most fundamental, far-reaching and all-embracing principles of human freedom and of economic well-being".

Emma Goldman was worried about the ongoing Russian Civil War and the possibility of being seized by anti-Bolshevik forces.

The publishers added these titles to attract attention; Emma Goldman protested, albeit in vain.

Emma Goldman found it difficult to acclimate to the German leftist community in Berlin.

In 1925, the spectre of deportation loomed again, but James Colton, a Scottish anarchist Emma Goldman had first met in Glasgow whilst on a speaking tour in 1895, had offered to marry her and provide British citizenship.

Emma Goldman traveled to Canada in 1927, just in time to receive news of the impending executions of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Boston.

Emma Goldman longed to join the mass demonstrations in Boston; memories of the Haymarket affair overwhelmed her, compounded by her isolation.

Emma Goldman secured a cottage in the French coastal city of Saint-Tropez and spent two years recounting her life.

Emma Goldman stayed in Canada, writing articles for US publications.

Emma Goldman wrote in sadness, but he never read the letter; she received a call in the middle of the night that Berkman was in great distress.

Emma Goldman left for Nice immediately but when she arrived that morning, Goldman found that he had shot himself and was in a nearly comatose paralysis.

Emma Goldman was invited to Barcelona and in an instant, as she wrote to her niece, "the crushing weight that was pressing down on my heart since Sasha's death left me as by magic".

Emma Goldman was welcomed by the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo and Federacion Anarquista Iberica organizations, and for the first time in her life lived in a community run by and for anarchists, according to true anarchist principles.

Emma Goldman wrote regularly for Spain and the World, a biweekly newspaper focusing on the civil war.

Emma Goldman called it "the most beautiful tribute I have ever received".

On Saturday, February 17,1940, Emma Goldman suffered a debilitating stroke.

Emma Goldman became paralyzed on her right side, and although her hearing was unaffected, she could not speak.

Emma Goldman was buried in German Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago, near the graves of those executed after the Haymarket affair.

Emma Goldman spoke and wrote extensively on a wide variety of issues.

Emma Goldman was influenced by many diverse thinkers and writers, including Mikhail Bakunin, Henry David Thoreau, Peter Kropotkin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Emma Goldman's aristocracy was neither of birth nor of purse; it was the spirit.

Emma Goldman believed it was necessary for anarchist thinkers to live their beliefs, demonstrating their convictions with every action and word.

Emma Goldman supported her partner Alexander Berkman's attempt to kill industrialist Henry Clay Frick, and even begged him to allow her to participate.

Emma Goldman believed that Frick's actions during the Homestead strike were reprehensible and that his murder would produce a positive result for working people.

Emma Goldman believed that the economic system of capitalism was incompatible with human liberty.

Originally opposed to anything less than complete revolution, Emma Goldman was challenged during one talk by an elderly worker in the front row.

Emma Goldman said that he understood my impatience with such small demands as a few hours less a day, or a few dollars more a week.

Emma Goldman viewed the state as essentially and inevitably a tool of control and domination.

Emma Goldman maintained an anti-voting position even when many anarcho-syndicalists in 1930s Spain voted for the formation of a liberal republic.

Emma Goldman wrote that any power anarchists wielded as a voting bloc should instead be used to strike across the country.

Emma Goldman disagreed with the movement for women's suffrage, which demanded the right of women to vote.

Emma Goldman was a passionate critic of the prison system, critiquing both the treatment of prisoners and the social causes of crime.

Emma Goldman viewed crime as a natural outgrowth of an unjust economic system, and in her essay "Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure", she quoted liberally from the 19th-century authors Fyodor Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde on prisons, and wrote:.

Emma Goldman was a committed war resister and was particularly opposed to the draft, viewing it as one of the worst of the state's forms of coercion, and was one of the founders of the No-Conscription League for which she was ultimately arrested and imprisoned in 1917 before being deported in 1919.

Emma Goldman's and Reitman's experiences with vigilantism in the San Diego free speech fight in 1912 is an example of their persistence in the fight for free speech despite risking their safety.

Emma Goldman was an advocate of free love, and a strong critic of marriage.

Emma Goldman saw early feminists as confined in their scope and bounded by social forces of Puritanism and capitalism.

Emma Goldman was an outspoken critic of prejudice against homosexual and genderqueer people.

In essays like "The Hypocrisy of Puritanism" and a speech entitled "The Failure of Christianity", Emma Goldman made more than a few enemies among religious communities by attacking their moralistic attitudes and efforts to control human behavior.

Emma Goldman blamed Christianity for "the perpetuation of a slave society", arguing that it dictated individuals' actions on Earth and offered poor people a false promise of a plentiful future in heaven.

Emma Goldman sent him the selection from Living My Life about "the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things", recounting that she had been admonished "that it did not behoove an agitator to dance".

The women's movement of the 1970s that "rediscovered" Emma Goldman was accompanied by a resurgent anarchist movement, beginning in the late 1960s, which reinvigorated scholarly attention to earlier anarchists.

Emma Goldman has been depicted in numerous works of fiction over the years, including Warren Beatty's 1981 film Reds, in which she was portrayed by Maureen Stapleton, who won an Academy Award for her performance.

Emma Goldman has been a character in two Broadway musicals, Ragtime and Assassins.

Emma Goldman has been honored by a number of organizations named in her memory.

Emma Goldman was a prolific writer, penning countless pamphlets and articles on a diverse range of subjects.

Emma Goldman authored six books, including an autobiography, Living My Life, and a biography of fellow anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre.