Emma Goldman Biography Quotes 39 Report mistakes

Early Life and Emigration
Emma Goldman was born in 1869 in the city of Kovno, in the Russian Empire, today Kaunas, Lithuania. She grew up in a Jewish family amid the social and political constrictions of the late imperial period. The atmosphere of repression, punctuated by antisemitic hostility and episodes of violent unrest, helped shape her early sense that established authority could be unjust. As a teenager she was outspoken, restless, and unruly by the standards of her time. In 1885 she emigrated to the United States with a sister, joining relatives in Rochester, New York. There she worked long hours in garment factories, experienced the drudgery of industrial life, and witnessed the precarious conditions of immigrant workers. A brief and unhappy marriage to Jacob Kershner did not last. The Haymarket affair of 1886 and the execution of Chicago anarchists left a deep impression on her, seeding a lifelong commitment to radical ideas and to the defense of political dissent.

Radicalization in New York
By 1889 Goldman moved to New York City and entered the vibrant world of Yiddish-speaking and immigrant radical circles. She learned public speaking, first under the tutelage of Johann Most, a fiery German émigré anarchist and editor. While she soon broke with Most over tactics and personality, she retained his example of fearless oratory. In New York she formed a lifelong personal and political partnership with Alexander Berkman. Together they absorbed the writings of Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin while engaging with the ferment of the Lower East Side. Goldman's formidable presence, quick intelligence, and willingness to debate adversaries made her a compelling lecturer at union halls and meeting rooms, where she spoke on anarchism, labor, women's emancipation, and the meaning of freedom.

Homestead, Free Speech, and the Making of a Public Agitator
The Homestead strike of 1892 drew Goldman and Berkman into dramatic conflict with industrial power. Berkman attempted to assassinate steel magnate Henry Clay Frick in an act he believed would spark broader revolt. The plot failed, Berkman was imprisoned, and Goldman was vilified in the press, though not convicted for the incident. In 1893 she was jailed for incitement to riot after addressing the unemployed in New York's Union Square, an early episode that fixed her identity as Red Emma in the public imagination and made her a symbol of free speech battles. Goldman sharpened her critique of state power, militarism, and capitalist exploitation while also condemning puritanism and the constraints of conventional morality. She developed alliances with figures such as Voltairine de Cleyre, who shared her insistence that personal autonomy and social freedom were inseparable.

Mother Earth, Feminism, and Birth Control
In 1906 Goldman founded the monthly journal Mother Earth, with help from collaborators including Hippolyte Havel, Max Baginski, and, after his release, Berkman. Mother Earth became a forum for anarchist theory, social criticism, literature, and cultural commentary. Goldman's essays from this period, later collected in Anarchism and Other Essays, argued for a society grounded in voluntary cooperation and mutual aid, and she emphasized that women's liberation required more than formal equality. She criticized marriage as an economic and sexual cage and championed free love as an ethical relationship free of coercion. Influenced by sex reformers such as Havelock Ellis and engaged with contemporaries like Margaret Sanger, she promoted access to birth control as essential to women's health and self-determination. She trained and worked as a nurse and midwife, bringing her political beliefs into contact with the realities of working-class women's lives.

Goldman's reach extended into the arts. She believed that theater could awaken social consciousness, and her book The Social Significance of the Modern Drama analyzed playwrights such as Ibsen and Shaw. For her, art and politics were not separate realms but complementary forces for human liberation.

Public Scandal and Resilience
The 1901 assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz cast a long shadow. Czolgosz claimed inspiration from anarchist ideas and had attended Goldman's lectures; she was interrogated and denounced but not charged. The episode intensified official scrutiny and public hostility. She continued touring, confronting hostile audiences and police repression. In 1912, during a free speech fight in San Diego, she and her companions faced vigilante violence; Ben Reitman, her partner and manager, was kidnapped and brutally tarred and feathered, and Goldman was forced out of town under guard. The notoriety strengthened her determination to speak wherever radicals and workers were denied the right to assemble. She worked with labor organizers and supported the Industrial Workers of the World, while maintaining ties within the international anarchist movement to figures such as Carlo Tresca and Rudolf Rocker.

War, Prison, and Deportation
When the United States entered World War I, Goldman opposed conscription on principled grounds. With Berkman she founded the No-Conscription League in 1917, insisting that free people cannot be compelled to fight by the state. The Wilson administration, through the Espionage Act, targeted antiwar dissenters. Arrested and tried, Goldman and Berkman were convicted for obstructing the draft. She served a sentence in Missouri while Berkman was imprisoned in Atlanta. Upon their release in 1919, federal authorities moved to deport foreign-born radicals during the Palmer Raids. A. Mitchell Palmer and a rising Justice Department official, J. Edgar Hoover, oversaw the process. Goldman and Berkman were among the 249 deportees sent to Soviet Russia aboard the USAT Buford in December 1919.

Revolution and Disillusionment in Russia
Goldman initially greeted the Russian Revolution with hope, expecting a flowering of workers' control and social freedom. What she encountered in 1920 and 1921 was the tightening grip of Bolshevik authority: censorship, political prisons, and suppression of independent unions and anarchists. She visited Peter Kropotkin, whose moral authority loomed large for her; Kropotkin's death in 1921 and the public funeral, an extraordinary moment of anarchist visibility in the Soviet state, marked the end of an era. The crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion, which she and Berkman witnessed at close range, was decisive in her break with Bolshevism. Deeply pained but determined to bear witness, she left Russia and set about documenting what she had seen in My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia, books that stirred debate on the left over ends and means in revolutionary politics.

Exile in Europe and Return to North America
Goldman lived for years as a stateless exile in Europe, moving among Sweden, Germany, France, and Britain. She continued to lecture and write, sustaining relationships with exiled anarchists and socialists and defending political prisoners. The Sacco and Vanzetti case galvanized her, and she joined international efforts to win a retrial for the two Italian anarchists, highlighting prejudice and procedural injustice. In 1925 she entered a marriage of convenience with the British-born anarchist James Colton, obtaining a passport that allowed her wider movement. This pragmatic step enabled lecture tours in Canada and access to Britain at a time when governments were wary of her presence.

In 1931 she published Living My Life, a two-volume autobiography recounting her journey from Kovno to the world stage. The book blended personal narrative with a chronicle of strikes, trials, and intellectual battles, offering a window into the radical milieu of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1934, after many years of exclusion, she was granted a limited visa to the United States on the condition that she confine her public talks to literature. She seized the opportunity to speak across the country on drama and culture, implicitly linking art to freedom without overtly violating the terms of her entry.

The Spanish Civil War and Final Years
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 drew Goldman into her last great cause. She traveled to Spain and to London on behalf of the anarchist movement, supporting the CNT-FAI and speaking to raise funds and solidarity. In Barcelona she encountered a revolution in progress that resonated with her ideals of workers' self-management. She worked with leaders such as Federica Montseny, who briefly served as Minister of Health, and she admired the courage of militants like Buenaventura Durruti. Even as the war turned against the Republic and internal conflicts sapped the movement, Goldman labored to defend the gains of the social revolution and to publicize its achievements to English-speaking audiences.

Her health declined in the late 1930s. She settled for periods in Canada, where she found a measure of calm after decades of agitation. In 1940, after a stroke in Toronto, she died at the age of 70. Authorities permitted her body to be transported to the United States for burial at Waldheim Cemetery, now Forest Home Cemetery, near the graves of the Haymarket martyrs, a symbolic resting place for a woman whose political consciousness had been ignited by that event.

Ideas, Legacy, and Influence
Emma Goldman's essays, speeches, and organizing fused a libertarian critique of state power with a humanistic insistence on personal autonomy. She argued that true freedom required social arrangements that nurtured individuality, voluntary association, and mutual aid. She saw patriarchy and economic domination as intertwined, and she pressed for women's sexual self-determination, contraception, and the right to choose relationships outside the strictures of legal marriage. She insisted that free speech was not an abstract privilege but the precondition for social learning and collective change.

Her life intersected with a wide cast of figures: comrades like Alexander Berkman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Hippolyte Havel, and Carlo Tresca; intellectuals and reformers such as Margaret Sanger, Peter Kropotkin, and Rudolf Rocker; adversaries and antagonists from Henry Clay Frick to A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover. She was repeatedly tested by repression, from early arrests to wartime imprisonment and deportation, and she refused to temper her convictions for safety or popularity. At the same time, she revised her judgments when experience demanded it, as in her break with Bolshevism after Kronstadt. The power of her example lies in that synthesis of courage and self-critique.

Goldman's legacy endures in debates over civil liberties, reproductive autonomy, sexual freedom, and the ethics of direct action. Her writings on prisons, labor, and gender remain part of the canon of radical thought, read by activists and scholars alike. More than a symbol, she was a working organizer, editor, nurse, lecturer, and witness to the great upheavals of her age. From the factory floors of Rochester to the lecture halls of North America and the revolutionary streets of Barcelona, Emma Goldman left a record of a life lived in pursuit of a world where free men and women could develop their capacities without coercion.

Our collection contains 39 quotes who is written by Emma, under the main topics: Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Justice - Love.

Other people realated to Emma: Max Stirner (Philosopher), E. L. Doctorow (Author), Howard Zinn (Historian), Warren Beatty (Actor), John Reed (Journalist)