Emma Goldman

Her father beat all his children and saved the whip for her, the one who argued back. In Papilė she watched a peasant flogged with a knout and never got past it. Her religion teacher refused her the good-conduct certificate she needed for the Königsberg gymnasium. In a Saint Petersburg corset shop a man took her to a hotel room and did what she called violent contact and her biographers call rape. When her father refused to let her follow a half-sister to America, she said she would go into the Neva. He gave in. She landed at Castle Garden on December 29, 1885, sewed overcoats in Rochester for two and a half dollars a week, and married a man she soon left. Then Chicago hanged the Haymarket anarchists.

She and Alexander Berkman decided in 1892 that killing Henry Clay Frick would set the Homestead strikers off. He would do the deed, she the argument. She went into the street to raise money by prostitution, and a man bought her a beer, gave her 10 dollars and told her she had not got the knack. Berkman shot Frick, failed, and drew 22 years. A year on Blackwell's Island followed in 1893 for inciting to riot, and she came out trained as a nurse. She founded Mother Earth in 1906 and edited it into a home for radical writing. In February 1916 she took two weeks in a workhouse rather than pay a 100-dollar fine for a contraception lecture. In 1917 she and Berkman each drew two years and 10,000 dollars for telling men not to register for the draft.

J. Edgar Hoover, running the Justice Department's General Intelligence Division, wrote that she and Berkman were beyond doubt two of the most dangerous anarchists in the country. At her hearing on October 27, 1919 she refused to answer questions and read a statement instead: today so-called aliens are deported, tomorrow native Americans will be banished. The Buford sailed on December 21 with 249 people aboard, and most of the American press cheered it out of the harbor. Then the revolution she had spent 30 years arguing for turned out to belong to the Bolsheviks. Kronstadt settled it in March 1921. She left that December, published My Disillusionment in Russia in 1923, and lost a large part of the left for saying so out loud. Stateless at 56, she married a Welsh miner in 1925 for the passport.

A stroke took her speech in February 1940. The greatest orator in America, a friend said, could not utter one word. A second killed her in Toronto on May 14. The service that deported her alive let her body back in, and she went into German Waldheim by the Haymarket graves. Then 30 years of obscurity. Dover reissued her memoir in 1970. Alix Kates Shulman published Red Emma Speaks in 1972. In 1973 a printer asked her for a shirt slogan. She sent a passage about the right to beautiful, radiant things, and about being told it did not behoove an agitator to dance. He condensed it into a sentence Goldman never wrote, and it has sold ever since.

Emma Goldman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Mother Earth other
  The monthly she founded and first edited, and a home for radical writing for a decade 1906
• Anarchism and Other Essays book
  Her clearest statement of the philosophy 1910
• The Social Significance of the Modern Drama book
  Ibsen, Shaw and Chekhov read as political argument 1914
• My Disillusionment in Russia book
  The book that cost her much of her own movement 1923
• Living My Life book
  Two volumes, 1931 and 1935, and the source of the line she never said 1931

• December 29, 1885 aged 16 Arrives at Castle Garden with her half-sister Helena
• February 1887 aged 17 Marries Jacob Kershner in Rochester and divorces him within the year
• July 23, 1892 aged 23 Berkman shoots Henry Clay Frick under the plan she helped make Frick survived. Berkman was beaten unconscious by the workers he meant to inspire, and sentenced to 22 years.
• August 21, 1893 aged 24 Arrested at a Union Square speech and sentenced to a year on Blackwell's Island The judge called her a dangerous woman. She ran a 16-bed infirmary ward inside.
• September 1901 aged 32 Held two weeks after Leon Czolgosz shoots President McKinley She had distanced herself from him beforehand and refused to condemn him afterward.
• 1906 aged ~37 Founds Mother Earth
• February 11, 1916 aged 46 Arrested as she is about to lecture on contraception She served two weeks rather than pay the 100-dollar fine.
• December 21, 1919 aged 50 Deported aboard the Buford, which the press nicknamed the Soviet Ark
• May 14, 1940 aged 70 Dies in Toronto, and her body is allowed back into the United States

• Henry Clay Frick 1849–1919
  Dominated coke supply for steelmaking and ran Carnegie Steel during the Homestead strike. target of the plan she helped make
• J. Edgar Hoover 1895–1972
  Longtime FBI director who built a powerful national police institution while conducting extensive political surveillance and abuses. built the case that deported her
• Margaret Sanger 1879–1966
  Birth-control advocate who transformed reproductive health access while leaving a deeply contested legacy involving eugenics. fellow defendant on contraception
• Eugene V. Debs 1855–1926
  Socialist Party leader who ran for president five times from prison and championed labor rights. jailed under the same wartime law
• Leon Czolgosz 1873–1901
  Anarchist whose assassination of William McKinley put Theodore Roosevelt in the White House. refused to condemn him
• Nellie Bly 1864–1922
  Reporter whose undercover asylum investigation and record circumnavigation established investigative reporting. interviewed her