GOLDMAN, EMMA

GOLDMAN, EMMA (1869–1940), U.S. anarchist writer and lecturer, leading advocate of anarchism in the United States. Goldman, born in Kovno, Lithuania, grew up there and in Koenigsberg and St. Petersburg, immigrating to the United States in 1885. Her independent spirit emerged early, and disputes with teachers and her father cut short her formal education. For the most part she was self-educated, particularly in anarchist thought. Her long and close association with alexander berkman was the most significant influence on her thought and deed. Unlike many anarchists, she moved beyond the small radical immigrant community, and her lectures and her journal Mother Earth (1906–18) aimed to illuminate the injustice and immorality of American society. Goldman became an open advocate of birth control in the years before World War I, which led to considerable notoriety. However, it was her vigorous opposition to conscription during the war that finally led the United States government to imprison her and ban Mother Earth from the mails. Goldman had long been considered dangerous, and the combination of a technical weakness in her citizenship status and legislation that broadened the grounds for action against undesirable aliens led to her deportation to the Soviet Union in 1919. By 1921 she fled that country, repelled by the suppression of the individual, which seemed as complete under Bolshevism as under capitalism. While she continued to write and lecture, her active political career was ended except for vigorous efforts on behalf of the Catalonian anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. Her life was one of commitment to anarchism in theory, and to personal independence and radical political action in practice. Goldman continuously focused on the basic contention that the state was a coercive force that destroyed the differences among individuals and eliminated genuine freedom in defense of the conformity required by society. She stressed the freedom of the individual, responsive to self-developed standards of love and justice. Her demand for individual freedom never wavered, and she detested capitalism because of its inherent inequalities, which doomed the majority of persons to a toilsome and regimented life focused on material matters. She favored communism as the ultimate form of economic emancipation to break the link between work and income that enslaved men in Western capitalist states. To Goldman, anarchism conformed to man's basic nature, and it would prove to be a workable and orderly system. Goldman's writings include Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914), The Psychology of Political Violence (1917), My Disillusionment in Russia (1923), My Further Disillusionment in Russia (1924), Living My Life (2 vols., 1931), and The Traffic in Women and Other Essays on Feminism (1971). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: R. Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise (1961). ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Nowhere at Home: Letters from Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (1975); Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader (1984); A. Wexler, Emma Goldman in America (1989); M. Duberman, Mother Earth: An Epic Drama of Emma Goldman's Life (1991); A. Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile (1992); J. Chalberg, Emma Goldman: American Individualist (1997). (Irwin Yellowitz)