Emma Goldman (1869–1940,) vilified as ‘Red Emma,’ was an American anarchist, feminist, essayist, and birth-control activist. A spokesperson for women’s freedom, she drew attention to American problems in civil liberties at the turn of the century.
Born in Kovno (now Kaunas,) Russian Empire, Goldman grew up in Lithuania, in Königsberg, and in St. Petersburg. Her Jewish family relocated to Russia but was forced to go to Germany to evade provincialism and anti-Semitism. In 1885, she immigrated to America, where she began a vigorous anarchist agitation against tyrannical employers. She was jailed in 1893 for incitement to riot in New York City.
Goldman founded and edited the feminist and anarchist monthly Mother Earth (1906–17) and became internationally identified for her rousing speeches and her visits to anarchist conclaves in Paris 1899 and Amsterdam 1907 She also worked extensively in American urban slums and she was imprisoned in 1917 for opposing government policy on conscription. She was deported to USSR for her history of provoking the deliberate use of violence to secure personal freedom.
Goldman returned to America in 1924 and later supported the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. Together with the sex educator Margaret Sanger, Goldman campaigned for women’s access to birth control.
Goldman’s publications include an autobiography, Living My Life (1931,) and Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) and My Disillusionment in Russia (1923.)
Theresa and Albert Moritz wrote the biography The World’s Most Dangerous Woman (2001.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Emma Goldman
The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Humanity
The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Justice
Indeed, the keynote of government is injustice. With the arrogance and self-sufficiency of the King who could do no wrong, governments ordain, judge, condemn, and punish the most insignificant offenses, while maintaining themselves by the greatest of all offenses, the annihilation of individual liberty.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Government
Idealists are foolish enough to throw caution to the winds. They have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Idealism, Ideals
Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one’s self-respect. For jealous people, like dope-fiends, stoop to the lowest level and in the end inspire only disgust and loathing.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Jealousy
The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Politicians, Politics
Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Politicians, Politics
If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Love
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.
—Emma Goldman
Morality and its victim, the mother—what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Mothers
Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline, fear, or punishment, and without the pressure of poverty: a new social organism which will make an end to the terrible struggle for the means of existence,—the savage struggle which undermines the finest qualities in man, and ever widens the social abyss. In short, Anarchism strives towards a social organization which will establish well-being for all.
—Emma Goldman
In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, however, woman’s premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, “until death doth part.”
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Marriage
Rather would I have the love songs of romantic ages, rather Don Juan and Madame Venus, rather an elopement by ladder and rope on a moonlight night, followed by the father’s curse, mother’s moans, and the moral comments of neighbors, than correctness and propriety measured by yardsticks.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Romance
The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.
—Emma Goldman
The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.
—Emma Goldman
Patriotism is a menace to liberty.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Patriotism
In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Nationality
Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man’s subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man.
—Emma Goldman
No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Lawyers
Patriotism … is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Patriotism
I’d rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Flowers
When we can’t dream any longer, we die.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Dreams, Foresight, Vision
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