Who was Emma Goldman?
Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 – May 14, 1940) was a Lithuanian-born anarchist known for her radical libertarian and feminist writing and speeches. She emigrated to the United States at sixteen, and was later deported to Russia, where she witnessed some events of the Russian Revolution. She also spent a number of years in Britain, where she wrote her autobiography and other works. Goldman was born to a Jewish family in Kaunas, Lithuania where her family ran a small inn. In the period of political repression after the assassination of Alexander II, she moved with her family to St Petersburg at the age of thirteen. There — due to economic hardship — she was forced to leave school and work in a factory. It was in that workplace that Goldman was introduced to revolutionary ideas; she obtained a copy of Cherychevsky’s What is to be done which sowed the seeds for her anarchist ideas and her independent attitude. She was sent to America with a half-sister after she refused to allow her father
She was born in Russia in 1869, the unwanted daughter of a rejecting father and died in 1940 after an active and controversial life. She left Russia for America in her teens, became a fiery feminist, free-love advocate and anarchist, lectured extensively, paved the way for Margaret Sanger’s bitterly contested campaign to make birth control legal, and served several terms in jail, among them one in 1916 for advocating that “women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.” Starting in August, the clinic began to offer something new, which would have surprised its founders as much as its longevity: services for teenage males, developed from the persuasion that “by screening, treating and educating our sons, brothers, partners and other males in our lives, we believe that Emma is ultimately serving women, making this service consistent with our clinic’s mission.” So long as the indefatigable preborn propagandists keep up their tactics, fair and foul, against women’s repr
