Life Story: Emma Goldman (1869-1940)

Emma Goldman was born on June 27, 1869 in Kovno, Lithuania. Emma had a difficult childhood. Her father was violent and abusive and her mother struggled with depression. Harsh laws that restricted Jewish mobility and economic activity made it almost impossible for Jewish families like Emma’s to escape poverty. 

Emma and her family moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, when she was twelve years old. It was there that Emma first encountered the growing revolutionary movement in Russia and started studying political radicalism. At sixteen she had to leave school take a job as a seamstress in a corset shop. In 1885 her father sought to arrange a marriage for her. To escape the marriage and her abusive father, Emma immigrated to the United States with her sister Helena.

Emma and Helena settled in Rochester, New York, and found work in a garment factory. Emma’s interest in political radicalism only grew with her experience as a laborer in the US. The long hours, unequal pay, and suppression of workers’ rights added fuel to a growing fire within the young activist and agitator.

In 1887 Emma married a young Jewish immigrant and naturalized citizen named Jacob Kerschner. The marriage lasted less than a year. Her husband proved to be abusive and controlling, regularly threatening to take his own life if she ever left him. By the age of twenty she was divorced and living in New York City, as she had realized she wanted more than married life in a small city. 

Emma was particularly drawn to the political theory called anarchism. She believed that human nature was inherently good, and that people would naturally organize communities around common interests. She thought government systems created unnecessary competition among well-meaning people. But she did not accept all the tenants of anarchism. Anarchists believed that the destruction of the capitalist-driven government would make everyone equal regardless of gender or race, so they did not worry about questions like women’s rights. Emma argued that women needed to advocate for their emancipation from men. It was this belief that made her a vocal champion of women’s rights.

In 1892 Emma and her new partner Alexander Berkman were outraged by industrialist Henry Clay Frick’s violent treatment of striking steel mill strikers in Homestead, Pennsylvania. They formed a plot to assassinate him, and Alexander shot Frick in Frick’s office. Frick survived, but Alexander was sentenced to twenty-two years in jail for attempted assassination, and served fourteen. Emma was arrested but avoided jail time because there was not enough evidence to prove she had been involved in the plot. This incident spawned Emma’s reputation as a violent and infamous radical.

In the years that followed Emma built a career and reputation as an anarchist agitator. She spoke on street corners and at mass meetings, attended radical discussion groups, and built connections among the bohemian circles of Greenwich Village. In 1906 she launched the magazine Mother Earth, which featured articles on politics, anarchism, free love, birth control, and feminist ideologies.

Emma’s combination of feminism and anarchism made her a truly unique thinker among the reformers of her era. She criticized what she saw as a narrow, misguided view of women’s rights. She was wary of the suffrage movement because she believed that participation in politics was participation in a corrupt system that perpetuated inequality. She argued that there was no guarantee that women voters would fix political corruption.

Instead, Emma urged women to turn their attention to issues beyond suffrage. She trained as a nurse and midwife. She was often arrested for publicly promoting birth control and breaking decency laws and regularly spoke out against the Comstock Act.

Emma also practiced and advocated for free love/sexual freedom, and she publicly criticized the institution of marriage as hypocritical and oppressive. She firmly believed that there was no way for two people to know if they truly loved each other without living together first. She also felt that if two people stopped loving each other, they should not be forced to stay together. In 1893 she told Nellie Bly in an interview that Americans should do away with marriage altogether. In an age when marriage was considered the bedrock of civil society and divorces extremely difficult to obtain, usually requiring proof of adultery, abuse, or abandonment, Emma dismissed the notion that wifehood was woman’s primary and natural role in society.

Emma’s ideas won her many admirers and even more enemies. As a radical feminist, immigrant, and political agitator, she was frequently described as “un-American.” She was arrested multiple times and served a one-year prison sentence in the 1890s. But her activism crossed the line of no return in 1917. Emma and Alexander formed the No-Conscription League and used Mother Earth to urge men to resist the World War I draft. Emma held many anti-war meetings that attracted thousands of participants. The government retaliated by banning Mother Earth and arresting Emma and Alexander for conspiracy against the draft. They were each sentenced to two years in prison.

Emma was released from prison in September 1919 but the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division rearrested her less than two months later as an “enemy alien.” Emma claimed that she was an American citizen because she had married an American man back in Rochester. The government disagreed, stating that she had rejected her citizenship when she ended the marriage. On December 21, 1919, Emma and Alexander became part of a large group of 200 men and women exiled to revolutionary Russia in the years before the official founding of the Soviet Union.

Emma continued her activism as an anarchist and women’s rights advocate throughout the rest of her life. She traveled and lived in various countries in Europe, including Sweden, England, and Spain. She also traveled to and worked in Canada, where she died on May 14, 1940.

• anarchism: The political belief that government is unnecessary, and that society would be better off if individuals took care of themselves and each other.
• assassinate: To murder a prominent person.
• conscription: Forced enrollment in the military. A draft.
• corset: A close-fitting undergarment for women that restricted and shaped the hips, waist, and chest.
• draft: The mandatory enrollment of citizens in the military.
• emancipation: The act of freeing someone from a restriction.
• enemy alien: An immigrant from a country with which the United States is at war.
• free love: The belief that people should love whomever they wish for however long they wish without the institution of marriage.
• naturalized citizen: An immigrant who completes the process of becoming a citizen in his or her new country.
• radicalism: Extreme behavior and beliefs.
• suffrage: The right of voting; in this era, suffrage often referred specifically to women’s suffrage, or the right of women to vote.
• suppression: Restriction.
• World War I: Military conflict that involved countries from every inhabited continent from 1914-1918.