Emma Goldman, undoubtedly one of the most notable and influential women
in modern American history, consistently promoted a wide range of controversial
movements and principles, including union organization and the eight-hour day,
sexual freedom and birth control, equality and independence for women, and
freedom of thought and expression for all. Goldman's advocacy of these causes,
which many deemed subversive at the time, helped set the historical context for
some of today's most important political and social debates.
Poverty, oppression, and the longing for deliverance marked Emma
Goldman's early years. Born into a poor Jewish family in a backward, anti-Semitic
country, Goldman struggled to escape, first through flights of imagination, then
through formal education, and finally by means of emigration.1
On June 27, 1869, Emma Goldman's life began in Kovno, a small imperial
Russian city, now in Lithuania. Her family suffered from the anti-Semitism of the
times, living in Jewish ghettos and moving often in search of opportunity.
Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman around 1917-191...
Goldman's Mother Earth magazine became a home to r...
Henry C. FrickBrutalized by this life, Goldman's father directed his anger against his family. His
often violent assertion of authority over them led young Emma, perhaps more
acutely aware than he of the injustice of their situation, to imagine instead directing
violence outward against the enemies of the Jewish people, in the manner of Judith,
the Biblical heroine with whom she identified.2
Goldman became interested in more modern ideas at twelve, after the family
moved to St. Petersburg. There she glimpsed the possibility of ending the old order
when Czar Alexander II was assassinated. Excited by the ideas of the Russian
Populists and Nihilists, Emma eagerly devoured Chernishevsky's What Is to Be
Done? and promptly replaced her childhood heroine Judith with Chernishevsky's
modern Vera, a political organizer and cooperative worker.3
Soon after, Goldman left Russia to seek what she hoped would be a...
Great Job
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