Post by Deleted on Jun 27, 2019 18:56:58 GMT -5
Emma Goldman, One of History’s Best-Known Anarchists, Was Born 150 Years Ago
150 years ago today, a little girl was born into a Jewish ghetto in a western corner of the Russian Empire. Due to her gender, her 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 to the violent antisemitism that continued to plague her homeland after she emigrated to the States in 1885 at age 16 in search of freedom.
Despite those seemingly insurmountable odds, she grew up to become one of history’s best-known anarchists and fiercest feminist voices. She was born on June 27, 1869 in Lithuania and as a teenager in Rochester, NY and later in New Haven, CT, worked in a factory. She traveled in radical circles, eventually landing in New York City’s vibrant Lower East Side, which was a hotbed of anarchist organizing.
As an adult, her speeches and writings on workers’ rights, revolution, and women’s oppression struck fear into the powers of state and capital, leading the press to christen her “Red Emma”. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called her “the most dangerous woman in America.” As an elder, she continued to fight for anarchism, feminism, workers’ rights, and collective liberation until her last breath at age 70.
Her journey out of Tsarist Russia and into a leading light of anarchism began on the factory floor and crystallized at the gallows. Though she had already been exposed to leftist politics by fellow workers at her factory job in Rochester, the 1886 Haymarket affair 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”—and it became her life’s work to spread the message of liberation far and wide.