Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 – May 14, 1940) was a Lithuanian-born anarcho-communist known for her anarchist writings and speeches. Adopted by Second-wave feminists, she has been lionized as an iconic "rebel woman" feminist. However, Goldman played a pivotal role in the development of anarchism in the US and Europe throughout the first half of the twentieth century. She immigrated to the United States at seventeen and was later deported to Russia, where she witnessed the results of the Russian Revolution. She spent a number of years in the South of France where she wrote her autobiography, Living my Life, and other works, before taking part in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 as the English language representative in London of the CNT-FAI.

Birth and early years

Emma Goldman grew up in a petit-bourgeois Jewish family in Kaunas, Lithuania (then under the control of Russia, and called Kovno by the Russians), 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, after a revolutionary sentiment had spread across the area, she decided to work in a factory as a corset maker. It was in that workplace that Goldman was introduced to revolutionary ideas; she obtained a copy of Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done, which sowed the seeds for her anarchist ideas and her independent attitude.

Related Topics:
Kaunas - Lithuania - Russia - Political repression - Assassination - Alexander II - St Petersburg - Chernyshevsky - What Is To Be Done

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