Emma Goldman

Based on Wikipedia: Emma Goldman

She horsewhipped her former mentor in front of a crowded lecture hall.

Emma Goldman had purchased a toy whip specifically for this confrontation. Johann Most, the man who had trained her in public speaking, who had told her she would "take my place when I am gone," had publicly mocked her lover's failed assassination attempt. So she marched up to the stage, demanded he explain himself, and when he dismissed her, struck him across the face. Then she broke the whip over her knee and threw the pieces at him.

She was twenty-three years old.

The Making of a Revolutionary

Goldman's path to becoming America's most notorious anarchist began with violence—but not the kind she would later advocate. Her father beat his children regularly, reserving special fury for Emma, the most defiant of them. He used a whip. Her mother rarely intervened. Goldman later theorized that her father's rage stemmed partly from sexual frustration, a remarkably Freudian insight for a woman born in 1869.

The Goldman family was Lithuanian Jewish, living in what was then the Russian Empire. Emma's mother Taube had buried her first husband, a young man she'd married at fifteen, and the love she'd felt had apparently died with him. Her second marriage—to Abraham Goldman, Emma's father—was an arrangement, and a bad one. Abraham lost his wife's inheritance in a failed business almost immediately. When Taube became pregnant, he desperately wanted a son. He got Emma instead.

This was June 27, 1869. From the beginning, Emma Goldman was a disappointment to men who expected her to be something else.

Education by Resistance

The family moved constantly—first to a village called Papilė, then to Königsberg in Prussia, then to Saint Petersburg. Goldman's formal education was sporadic and marked by conflict. One teacher beat students' hands with a ruler, targeting Goldman in particular. Another teacher attempted to molest his female students and was fired only because Goldman fought back.

But she also found a sympathetic German teacher who loaned her books and took her to the opera. Goldman passed the entrance exam for gymnasium—the European equivalent of a college-preparatory high school—but her religion teacher refused to write her a certificate of good behavior. Without it, she couldn't attend.

Her father had no patience for her intellectual ambitions anyway. When she begged him to let her return to school, he threw her French textbook into the fire. "Girls do not have to learn much," he shouted. "All a Jewish daughter needs to know is how to prepare gefilte fish, cut noodles fine, and give the man plenty of children."

So Goldman educated herself. She read about the Nihilists who had assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881. She devoured Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?, finding a role model in the protagonist Vera, a young woman who escapes her repressive family to live freely and organize a sewing cooperative. The book would remain a source of inspiration for the rest of Goldman's life.

Escape

Abraham Goldman tried to arrange his daughter's marriage when she was fifteen. She refused. He called her a "loose woman." She insisted she would marry only for love. They fought constantly.

Meanwhile, Goldman worked in a corset shop, fending off advances from Russian officers and other men. One man took her to a hotel room. Goldman described what happened as "violent contact." Her biographers call it rape. She was stunned, she wrote, by "the discovery that the contact between man and woman could be so brutal and painful." The experience, she felt, forever complicated her relationships with men.

When her older half-sister Helena announced plans to emigrate to America, Goldman desperately wanted to go. Her father refused. Helena offered to pay. Abraham still refused. Goldman threatened to throw herself into the Neva River. Finally, her father relented.

On December 29, 1885, sixteen-year-old Emma Goldman arrived at Castle Garden, the immigrant processing station at the southern tip of Manhattan. She carried with her a sewing machine, a few dollars, and a lifetime's worth of rage against authority.

Rochester and the First Marriage

Goldman settled upstate in Rochester, where Helena's sister Lena had already established a household. She found work as a seamstress, sewing overcoats for more than ten hours a day, earning two and a half dollars a week. When she asked for a raise and was denied, she quit.

At her next job, she met Jacob Kershner. They shared a love of books, dancing, and travel. They shared frustration with the monotony of factory work. After four months of courtship, they married in February 1887.

On their wedding night, Goldman discovered her husband was impotent.

The marriage deteriorated rapidly. Kershner became jealous and suspicious. He threatened suicide if she left him. Less than a year after the wedding, they divorced. He begged her to return, again threatening to poison himself. She went back. Three months later, she left for good.

Her parents, scandalized by her behavior, refused to let her into their home. Goldman picked up her sewing machine in one hand and a bag containing five dollars in the other, and headed for New York City.

Sachs' Café

On her very first day in New York, Goldman walked into Sachs' Café, a gathering place for radicals on the Lower East Side. There she met the two men who would shape the rest of her life.

The first was Alexander Berkman, a Russian-born anarchist whom Goldman would come to call Sasha. He invited her to a public speech that evening. The speaker was Johann Most, editor of a German-language radical newspaper called Freiheit—German for "Freedom."

Most was an advocate of what anarchists called "propaganda of the deed"—the use of dramatic violence to spark revolutionary consciousness in the masses. The theory held that a single spectacular act, properly timed and targeted, could awaken workers to their own power and inspire them to overthrow their oppressors. It was a theory that would soon be put to the test.

Goldman was transfixed by Most's oratory. He recognized something in her too, and took her on as a protégé, training her in the techniques of public speaking. He told her she was destined to take his place.

Finding Her Voice

Goldman's first major speech was in Rochester, a homecoming of sorts. She convinced Helena not to tell their parents she was speaking. Then she walked onto the stage and her mind went blank.

What happened next, she wrote, felt like possession:

Something strange happened. In a flash I saw it—every incident of my three years in Rochester: the Garson factory, its drudgery and humiliation, the failure of my marriage, the Chicago crime... I began to speak. Words I had never heard myself utter before came pouring forth, faster and faster. They came with passionate intensity... The audience had vanished, the hall itself had disappeared; I was conscious only of my own words, of my ecstatic song.

The "Chicago crime" she mentions was the Haymarket affair of 1886, an event that had radicalized an entire generation of American leftists. During a labor rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square, someone threw a bomb at police. In the chaos that followed, officers opened fire. Seven policemen and at least four civilians died. Eight anarchist organizers were convicted in a trial widely regarded as a miscarriage of justice. Four were hanged. The case made martyrs of them and drew thousands of young idealists—Goldman among them—into the anarchist movement.

Goldman quickly developed into a commanding public speaker, able to hold audiences of thousands. But she chafed under Most's mentorship. After a particularly successful speech in Cleveland, she felt she had become "a parrot repeating Most's views" and resolved to develop her own voice. When she returned to New York expressing independent opinions, Most was furious. "Who is not with me is against me!" he declared. Goldman left his newspaper and joined a rival publication.

Sasha

Meanwhile, Goldman's relationship with Alexander Berkman had deepened. They became lovers and moved into a communal apartment on 42nd Street with Berkman's cousin Fedya and Goldman's friend Helene Minkin. The arrangement was characteristic of Goldman's lifelong rejection of conventional domesticity—she believed in free love, the idea that intimate relationships should be based on mutual attraction and affection rather than legal contracts or social expectations.

Goldman and Berkman's romance had its difficulties, but they would remain bound together for decades, united by their shared commitment to anarchism and to each other. He called her Emma; she called him Sasha. In 1892, they opened an ice cream shop together in Worcester, Massachusetts.

They had been in business for only a few months when news from Pennsylvania changed everything.

Homestead

The Homestead Strike of 1892 became one of the most violent labor disputes in American history. Andrew Carnegie owned a massive steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh. When contract negotiations with the union broke down, Carnegie's manager Henry Clay Frick locked out the workers and brought in strikebreakers.

Frick was a hard man. He had made his fortune in coke—the coal derivative used to fuel steel furnaces—and had a reputation for crushing labor resistance with brutal efficiency. To protect his strikebreakers, he hired three hundred agents from the Pinkerton Detective Agency, essentially a private army available for rent to corporations.

On July 6, 1892, the Pinkertons attempted to land at the Homestead plant from barges on the Monongahela River. Armed workers were waiting for them. A twelve-hour gunfight ensued. When it was over, seven Pinkertons and nine strikers lay dead.

The nation's newspapers, remarkably, sided with the strikers. Public sympathy ran strongly against Frick and Carnegie. Reading the coverage, Goldman and Berkman saw an opportunity—not just to support the workers, but to strike a blow that would resonate across the country.

The Attentat

They decided to assassinate Henry Clay Frick.

In the anarchist tradition, such an act was called an attentat—a spectacular deed of propaganda meant to demonstrate that the powerful were not untouchable, that a single determined individual could strike at the heart of the capitalist system. Goldman and Berkman believed Frick's killing would inspire workers everywhere to rise up against their oppressors.

Berkman would carry out the assassination. Goldman would stay behind to explain his motives to the public afterward. But they needed money for the operation—for travel, for a weapon, for expenses.

Goldman decided to become a prostitute.

She was thinking of Sonya, a character in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, who sells her body to support her siblings. "Sensitive Sonya could sell her body," Goldman reasoned. "Why not I?"

She walked the streets. A man approached her, took her into a saloon, bought her a beer, and gave her ten dollars. Then he told her she didn't "have the knack" and advised her to quit the business. Goldman was too stunned to speak. She wrote to Helena claiming she was sick and asked for fifteen dollars.

Three Shots in Pittsburgh

On July 23, 1892, Alexander Berkman walked into Henry Clay Frick's office in Pittsburgh. He was carrying a concealed handgun. He shot Frick three times. Then he stabbed him in the leg.

Frick survived.

Even more devastating to Goldman and Berkman's hopes: the workers didn't rise up. Far from rallying to Berkman's cause, a group of Homestead steelworkers beat him unconscious before the police could take him away. The masses they had hoped to inspire condemned the attack. Even Johann Most, their former mentor and the great advocate of propaganda of the deed, publicly mocked the failed assassination.

Berkman was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Goldman would not see him as a free man until 1906.

The police raided Goldman's apartment, convinced she was involved in the plot. They found no evidence but pressured her landlord into evicting her anyway. She was now notorious—a known associate of a would-be assassin, watched by police, shunned even by many fellow anarchists who felt Berkman's action had been counterproductive.

And then there was the matter of Johann Most.

The Horsewhip

Most's public attacks on Berkman felt like the ultimate betrayal. This was the man who had trained Goldman, who had championed the very tactic Berkman had attempted, now condemning him for failure. Goldman decided he would answer for it.

She bought a toy horsewhip. She went to a public lecture where Most was speaking. She walked to the front of the hall and demanded he explain himself.

He dismissed her.

She struck him with the whip. She broke it over her knee. She threw the pieces at him.

She later regretted the assault—not the anger behind it, but the public spectacle she had made of herself. Still, the image endures: a twenty-three-year-old immigrant woman, publicly humiliating one of the most famous radical orators in America, refusing to be dismissed.

The Long Road

Goldman's career as an anarchist agitator was just beginning. Over the next two decades, she would be imprisoned multiple times—for "inciting to riot," for illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, she founded Mother Earth, an anarchist journal that would become one of the most influential radical publications in America.

Her lectures drew crowds of thousands. She spoke on anarchism, obviously, but also on atheism, free love, women's rights, prison reform, and homosexuality—topics that polite society refused to discuss. She argued that marriage was a form of slavery, that capitalism was organized theft, that the state existed only to protect the property of the rich from the poor. She was brilliant, fearless, and absolutely uncompromising.

In 1917, as the United States entered World War I, Goldman and Berkman—finally free from prison—organized against the newly instituted military draft. They were arrested for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" and sentenced to two years in federal prison.

When they were released in 1919, the country had changed. The Russian Revolution had terrified America's ruling class, and the government was rounding up radicals in what became known as the Palmer Raids. Goldman and Berkman, along with 248 other leftists, were deported to Russia.

Disillusionment

Goldman had initially supported the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks, she believed, were building the worker's paradise that anarchists had dreamed of for generations. Reality proved grimmer.

In 1921, sailors at the Kronstadt naval base near Petrograd rose up against the Bolshevik government, demanding free elections and civil liberties. The Red Army crushed the rebellion with brutal efficiency. Thousands were killed or imprisoned.

Goldman was horrified. She had traded one form of tyranny for another. The Soviet state, she now saw, was as oppressive as the capitalist governments she had spent her life fighting. She left Russia and never returned.

In 1923, she published My Disillusionment in Russia, a scathing account of the revolution's betrayal of its own ideals. It cost her many friends on the left, who accused her of giving ammunition to the enemies of socialism. She didn't care. She had never been one to subordinate truth to political convenience.

The Final Years

Goldman spent the rest of her life in exile—in England, in Canada, in France. She wrote a two-volume autobiography, Living My Life, published in 1931 and 1935. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the sixty-seven-year-old Goldman traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She was still fighting.

She died in Toronto on May 14, 1940, at the age of seventy.

For decades afterward, Goldman was largely forgotten, a footnote in the history of American radicalism. Then, in the 1970s, feminist scholars rediscovered her. Here was a woman who had lived exactly as she pleased, who had rejected marriage and motherhood and domesticity, who had fought for reproductive rights and sexual freedom half a century before the women's liberation movement. She became an icon.

What She Left Behind

Goldman's legacy is complicated. She advocated political violence—not as an end in itself, but as a tactic of liberation. The assassination attempt on Frick failed spectacularly, and she later distanced herself from such methods. But she never fully renounced them either.

What she did insist on, always, was freedom—freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of love. She rejected first-wave feminism's focus on voting rights as too narrow, too respectable. She wanted something bigger: a complete transformation of how people related to each other, how they worked, how they loved.

"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution," runs a famous quote often attributed to Goldman. She probably never said exactly those words—the origin appears to be a paraphrase of passages in her autobiography where she defends her love of dancing against comrades who thought it undignified for a revolutionary. But the sentiment is authentically hers. She believed that liberation meant nothing if it didn't include joy.

She was not a saint. She could be dogmatic, self-righteous, quick to condemn former allies. She spent years defending Berkman's attempted murder of Frick, a position that horrified even many sympathizers. She was, by her own admission, difficult to live with.

But she was also, in her way, incandescently brave. She said what she believed when saying it meant prison, meant deportation, meant being reviled by respectable society. She lived according to her principles in a way that few people, of any political persuasion, ever manage.

And once, when a man who had taught her everything she knew about public speaking betrayed someone she loved, she walked up to him in front of a crowded hall and horsewhipped him.

She was twenty-three years old. She was just getting started.