Women Activists From The United States

"If I can do no more, let my name stand among those who are willing to bear ridicule and reproach for the truth's sake, and so earn some right to rejoice when the victory is won."

"It is not a dirty word, "feminism." I just think that women belong in the human population with the same rights as everybody else. … The problem is, "A feminist looks like this, or is like that." We are taught not to like ourselves as women, we are taught what we're supposed to look like, what our measurements are supposed to be. I never hear what measurements men are supposed to be. Just women."

"on Catholicism:"

"on tolerance of gays: "You always have to remember - no matter what you're told - that God loves all the flowers, even the wild ones that grow on the side of the highway.""

"I fear my anarchists are not as free from sexual inhibitions and confusions as Emma Goldman and others expected. The intersection of personal sexuality and social community seems to always be a dangerous one, with a lot of red lights and sideswipes."

"Emma Goldman: "Our modern fetish is universal suffrage." After 1920, women were voting, as men did, and their subordinate condition had hardly changed."

"Emma Goldman was not postponing the changing of woman's condition to some future socialist era-she wanted action more direct, more immediate, than the vote."

"Emma Goldman's autobiography, Living My Life, conveys the anger, the sense of injustice, the desire for a new kind of life, that grew among the young radicals of that day."

"it is impossible to know the number of individuals whose political awakening-as with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, long-time revolutionary stalwarts of the next generation came from the Haymarket Affair."

"Emma and Sasha worked together harmoniously. When guests and reporters came to the house, or even friends of friends, Sasha would welcome them in a warm, friendly manner. He filled the house with a joyful spirit and his discussions were marked with authoritative facts and information...Everyone who knew or talked about Emma and Sasha could not speak of one without mentioning the other. Although they lived their own separate lives, they were inseparable emotionally and spiritually. Neither of them ever wrote a major article or a book without consulting the other. They knew and shared every event in their lives; there were no secrets between them. Their friendship and companionship were the finest. Those of us who were privileged to know them will never forget them...A great part of Emma’s life was lost to her with Sasha’s death."

"When Emma found a tiny house in St. Tropez in the south of France, she offered one room to Sasha for his residence...Emma wrote her memoirs, Living My Life, at that time. She would work late into the night and Sasha would serenade her early in the morning with the sound of the handmill grinding coffee for breakfast. This was the signal for Emma to wake up. Music to her ears. The morning would start with the greeting, “Bon Esprit” (“lively spirit”, “good cheer”) and Emma named her little hut “Bon Esprit”."

"Life was difficult for everyone in Germany after World War I and particularly so for the political refugees. Many of us felt that we had to leave Germany. A number of us went to France, including Sasha and Emma."

"I first met Alexander Berkman in New York City in the late Fall, 1919, at the home of Stella Ballantine, Emma Goldman’s niece. We discussed the Russian Revolution and the need to expose the atrocities of the Bolsheviks against the anarchists, socialists and all who dared to criticize their new dictatorial regime in Moscow...Emma said that we should not come out against the Bolsheviks at this time when they are fighting so many enemies of the revolution....Our second meeting with Sasha and Emma took place in Berlin four years later, November, 1923, where they had been living for two years, since January, 1922. They had left Soviet Russia greatly disillusioned with the Bolshevik regime. Sasha and Emma were each writing about their experiences in Russia."

"In the final analysis, neither woman was successful in her most cherished goal: to bring about a revolution that would crush capitalism, topple male supremacy, and usher in new freedoms for men, women, and children. In another sense, however, both were great successes. Goldman felt that despite her defeats, her life was indeed worth living...Because of anarchist-feminists, we can understand far better what it meant to choose to live in contradiction to the larger society, and to be aware of the costs and consequences of such a choice."

"Carl Nold, a friend of both women, touched on the essential distinction between the two women. "Emma Goldman tried to attract her hearers with a bass-drum. Voltairine de Cleyre has done it with a violin.""

"Emma Goldman's biography of de Cleyre, published in 1932 and until recently almost the sole source of readily available information about her, contributed to the myth. This biography is especially interesting because, although it was set almost in the form of a eulogy, Goldman used both subtle and overt comments to belittle her old rival...On the subject of de Cleyre's attitude and appearance, Goldman was unkind and inaccurate."

"Both de Cleyre and Goldman looked forward to a society in which gender did not form the basis for differences of personality, temperament, or intellectual interests."

"Goldman was the moving force behind the founding of New York's Modern School in 1911. Having contended as early as 1906 that American education destroyed the minds and spirits of children, she believed that "if education should mean anything at all, it must insist on the free growth and development of the innate forces and tendencies of the child. In this way alone can we hope for the free individual and eventually also for a free community, which shall make interference and coercion of human growth impossible." Goldman wanted the Modern School to encourage the spontaneous development of the child; the teacher should not direct, but "should be a sensitive instrument responding to the needs of the child as they are at anytime manifested." Teachers should not discipline their pupils because "to discipline a child is to set up a false moral standard," which would inhibit the child from developing his or her own moral nature."

"In the twentieth century de Cleyre and Goldman elaborated Lizzie May Holmes's ideas. Their views provided the theoretical foundation for the Modern School, the first full-scale anarchist educational experiment in the United States…Although de Cleyre's years as a teacher helped to form her educational ideas, both she and Goldman became associated with the Modern School movement as a result of their involvement in the cause of Francisco Ferrer."

"Goldman disagreed with Rebekah Raney. She felt that birth control was "a tremendously important phase, first because it is tabooed and the people who advocate it are persecuted. Secondly it represents the immediate question of life and death to masses of people.""

"Voltairine de Cleyre rendered Goldman's words (in August 1893) as follows: "Ask for work; if they do not give you work ask for bread; if they do not give you work or bread, take bread." Goldman insisted that she simply told the audience to "protect what belongs to you-what you yourselves have produced, and in the first place you ought to take bread." But the police officer who caused Goldman's arrest testified that she had told her audience to "take it by force," which convinced a jury to send her to Blackwell's Island prison for a year."

"Emma Goldman referred to Thoreau as "the greatest American Anarchist" and quoted approvingly his antigovernment statements.""

"For many young women Goldman came to be viewed as the symbol of liberation. That Goldman herself was not insulted by some of the views of her admirers demonstrated the extent of her misunderstanding of her own appeal. One woman compared a Goldman speech to "a glass of fine, old wine," under the influence of which the listener grew "more and more excited and stimulated... until finally I feel I can sit quietly no longer, but just must give expression somehow to the surge of thought and feeling she awakens." Louise Bryant likened Goldman to "the other good things that come to us, like the spring and the rain and the sunshine," and referred to her lectures as "inspirational messages" of "healing and life-giving qualities."...Goldman provided entertainment; perhaps her young admirers expected little more. Nevertheless, the relationship between Goldman and these women had a more serious and more disturbing aspect. Goldman was a remarkable figure who may have given these women a sense of being included in "the Cosmic secrets of nature," but they misinterpreted emotional experience as revolutionary commitment. In return for their admiration, the young bohemians expected Goldman to shoulder for them the burden of the consequences of political activism. Nearly the whole of anarchist philosophy was reduced to hero-worship of those few individuals who were willing to do the things that others were prepared only to imagine-to endure the unwelcome attention of the authorities, to accept prison, to act as surrogates for those who wished to have something in which to believe but not necessarily to emulate."

"Margaret Anderson trivialized Emma Goldman and displayed the limits of her own view of the latter's criticism of capitalist society when she said of Goldman, "She spoke only in platitudes, which I found fascinating.""

"While Voltairine de Cleyre had argued that the ballot served no useful purpose for either men or women, Emma Goldman went further and called it absolutely harmful: "Suffrage is an evil, . it has only helped to enslave people, it has but closed their eyes that they may not see how craftily they were made to submit.""

"While Goldman took the anarchist message to middle-class audiences, Berkman retained his faith in the revolutionary potential of the working class...Berkman and Goldman personified anarchism to Americans who read accounts of their speeches in the press or followed the news of their trials. The police persecution that they faced, the fear that they aroused, the relief with which the nation greeted their deportation-all testify to the sense of power and fierce determination that the two conveyed. And yet, during the first and second decades of the twentieth century, when the anarchists' notoriety was at a peak, their influence among American radicals was actually on the wane. Socialism, not anarchism, had become the dominant radical ideology, and some understanding of the reasons for the rejection of anarchism is necessary for any interpretation of its significance."

"No brief description can capture the ideas or the personality of Emma Goldman, the Russian Jewish seamstress whose criticisms of American capitalism earned her the epithet "Red Emma," whose free speech fights led to the creation of the American Civil Liberties Union, and whose refusal to bow to conventions of womanly social and sexual behavior brought her the admiration of young artists and writers struggling to make their own break from middle-class values and norms. Deported from the United States after World War I, she continued to the end of her life to wage, as her biographer Richard Drinnon has remarked, "an unrelenting fight for the free individual." Goldman's chief collaborator in her work as publicist, publisher, and agitator was Alexander Berkman."

"In the United States Communist-anarchism appealed mostly to working-class immigrants or their children, who felt cheated by false promises of the American dream. Although some declassé intellectuals and American craftworkers joined the communists, the majority of the movement was composed of Eastern European Jews who worked in the sweatshops of New York's garment district, of Italian factory workers, and other immigrants with few skills and little hope of advancement. The two most important figures among them were Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Originally followers of Johann Most, they emerged from his shadow in the early nineties to become the foremost advocates of revolutionary anarchism."

"Emma Goldman published her magazine Mother Earth in English. And although she read the Fraye Arbeter Shtime, she almost never wrote in Yiddish. Same goes for Alexander Berkman, who published the English language paper, The Blast–and these were publications aimed at a very different audience–these were publications not for a specifically Jewish audience but for a more sort of generally conceived American audience."

"Jewish anarchism was incredibly diverse in its inspirations and manifestations. It also therefore can’t be reduced to a few famous personalities like Emma Goldman."

"One evening I went to hear Emma Goldman, out of curiosity. She was an emotional speaker, but not nearly so dangerous looking as she had been pictured by the newspapers. Her talk was a bit bookish, and she looked like a hausfrau, and more maternal in appearance and manner than destructive. She carried her audience along with her like a mother hen followed by a brood of chicks. Sometimes, however, she rose to heights of flaming anger as she cited crimes of the police against workers or the use of federal or state troops to break strikes."

"Emma Goldman, legendary anarchist and advocate of women’s rights and sexual freedom...Born to a Jewish family in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, she emigrated to the US, where she became known as "Red Emma." She was an electrifying public speaker and an extremely competent propagandist, who was arrested countless times for her activism and was described by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover as the "most dangerous woman in America"...She was eventually deported from the US because of her activities to Russia, where she joined the revolution, although she became critical of the Bolshevik state when they began repressing workers' strikes and protests. Later she travelled to Spain to aid in the fight against fascism during the Spanish civil war, and remained active until the end."

"La mujer," one of the articles that Luisa Capetillo published in 1912 in Cultura obrera, was later included in the anthology, Voces de liberación (Voices of Liberation), published in 1921 by Lux Editorial from Argentina. Printed for the purpose of gathering the libertarian voices of the most progressive women in the world, the book contains short essays by Rosa Luxembourg, Clara Zetkin, Emma Goldman, Louise Michel, and various Latin American women including Margarita Ortega, a Mexican revolutionary, María López from Buenos Aires, and Rosalina Gutiérrez from Montevideo. The editorial note introducing the authors states, "These voices of liberation are a call to women by their own compañeras to think more and act together with men in the struggle for human emancipation."

"Emma Goldman was one of the most influential radical speakers and thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A native Yiddish speaker who was born in Kovno, Lithuania, she regularly gave speeches in Yiddish even after gaining fame as an English-language orator."

"Like the women civil rights activists, Jewish radicals have historically had a range of responses to Jewish identity. Emma Goldman, for example, balanced the universalism of her anarchist philosophy with an appreciation for Jewish culture and a clear commitment to speaking out against anti-Semitism. Revolutionary socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg, on the other hand, was hostile to any attempts to link her politics to her Jewish identity and was particularly critical of the Jewish socialist Bund."

"Looking well in spite of her advancing years, Emma Goldman now made her home in London. She had known great hardship, and had led a fighting life, in behalf of the right of the masses to lead decent lives, but she still had an astonishing fund of energy. Some inner fire seemed to sustain her. The blue eyes were mellowed with age, but her face remained smooth, and she still had the fair complexion that had so impressed me two decades earlier. Lately she had returned from Spain. And as an eye-witness, who had spent much time in both the Spanish cities and the rural districts, she gave us a compelling picture of those who were valiantly defending their republic, the industrial workers and peasants who had so few friends in France, England, and the Americas. She told also of the co-operative movement which had grown strong in many cities and towns, particularly in Catalonia, the care given to children, and the rise of women, who were coming into their own after centuries of Oriental subservience. When one remembered that all this was achieved while the Spanish people were fighting off a powerful and relentless enemy, one was awed...I found Emma busy with Spanish refugee children, visiting authorities, conferring with heads of numerous organizations in their behalf, publishing a newspaper, and lecturing. At the time she was busy preparing an exhibition to demonstrate pictorially what the war had done to the Spanish people. Declaring that the English newspapers had misrepresented their struggle, she had a collection of photographs of co-operative factories, and of co-operative farms with peasants working on them, that impressed her in Catalonia. In odd contrast to my mental picture of Emma as a public figure, I was pleasantly surprised to discover, in that miserable flat, that she was an excellent cook and a thoughtful hostess...No American would believe what she and others ate in Russia during the famine there, to sustain life. The memory of that period was still sharp in her mind. "What's happening now is only a beginning," she said, as the talk reverted to Spain. "Any day war may spread across Europe, and it will be more terrible than anything the world has ever seen. There will be suffering here and on the Continent comparable only to the days of the Black Plague.""

"Emma Goldman, fearless champion of human rights, in Madison Square Garden. Short-sleeved, her fists clenched, she vehemently opposes our entry into the world holocaust, and is threatened with arrest. "I defy the police, when the lives of millions are at stake!"... Alexander Berkman also speaks: "The men of this great land will never let themselves be led by the nose into an imperialist war!""

"Don’t go through life without reading the autobiographies of Emma Goldman, Prince Kropotkin, Malcolm X"

"Throughout the history of the socialist movement there has, therefore, been a strand of feminist critique from within. Many feminists shared in the vision of a just society, but criticised the ways in which communist parties sought to bring it about. Amongst the Bolsheviks, Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai were early critics of their party's policies and practice, and they, along with anarchist feminists such as Emma Goldman, laid some of the early groundwork in identifying socialism's failures."

"When Emma Goldman declared, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution," she was talking about the necessity of joy. Joy, hope, love, healing, are powerful forces. Just because at times these ideas have been manipulated to reinforce individualism doesn't make them sentimental distractions."

"Emma Goldman lived at the Anarchist's House too. Describe Emma Goldman? Her interest to Meridel Le Sueur was as "the first sexually 'free' woman" she met. "The women and feminists of that period never dealt with sex. They were Puritans.""

"women's marginalization in the process of History-making has set them back intellectually and has kept them for far longer than was necessary from developing a consciousness of their collectivity in sisterhood, not motherhood. The cruel repetitiousness by which individual women have struggled to a higher level of consciousness, repeating an effort made a number of times by other women in previous centuries, is not only a symbol of women's oppression but is its actual manifestation. Thus, even the most advanced feminist thinkers, up to and including those in the early 20th century, have been in dialogue with the "great men" before them and have been unable to verify, test and improve their ideas by being in dialogue with the women thinkers before them...Emma Goldman argued for free love and a new sort of communal life against the models of Marx and Bakunin; a dialogue with the Owenite feminists Anna Wheeler and Emma Martin might have redirected her thinking and kept her from inventing "solutions" which had already proven unworkable fifty years earlier...Simone de Beauvoir's erroneous assertion that, "They [women] have no past, no history, no religion of their own," was not just an oversight and a flaw, but a manifestation of the basic limitations which have for millennia limited the power and effectiveness of women's thought."

"As early as 1825 American working girls had organized in trade unions for economic demands and, briefly, used political as well as economic means to advance these demands. But their movement remained generally isolated from the woman's rights movement. Among the advocates of other forgotten alternatives to the woman's rights movement were Frances Wright, Robert Dale Owen, Ernestine Rose, John Humphrey Noyes, Henry C. Wright, and later Charlotte Gilman, Victoria Woodhull, Emma Goldman, and Margaret Sanger. These radicals had in common the convictions that the institutions of society were as oppressive to women as were its laws, that the patriarchal family was a questionable institution, and that sexual morality as hitherto defined would have to change. Their methods for attack and their specific programs varied, but they made the connection between religion, the family, sexual mores, and the social status of women. They pointed out, even if not always in specific terms, that merely constitutional changes would not basically alter the position of women."

"Recent scholarship has brought to light the important role played by Emma Goldman and other feminist women in the socialist and anarchist movement. Goldman lectured widely on birth control from 1910 on and served sixty days in jail for distributing pamphlets which offered advice on birth control methods and devices. She was one of the earliest influences on Margaret Sanger, who later sought to deny the socialist roots of her inspiration."

"With the conception that the Revolution was only a means of securing political power, it was inevitable that all revolutionary values should be subordinated to the needs of the Socialist State; indeed, exploited to further the security of the newly acquired governmental power."

"In its mad passion for power, the Communist State even sought to strengthen and deepen the very ideas and conceptions which the Revolution had come to destroy. It supported and encouraged all the worst antisocial qualities and systematically destroyed the already awakened conception of the new revolutionary values. The sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood — these fundamentals of the real regeneration of society — the Communist State suppressed to the point of extermination. Man's instinctive sense of equity was branded as weak sentimentality; human dignity and liberty became a bourgeois superstition; the sanctity of life, which is the very essence of social reconstruction, was condemned as unrevolutionary, almost counter-revolutionary. This fearful perversion of fundamental values bore within itself the seed of destruction."

"Our institutions and conditions rest upon deep-seated ideas. To change those conditions and at the same time leave the underlying ideas and values intact means only a superficial transformation, one that cannot be permanent or bring real betterment. It is a change of form only, not of substance, as so tragically proven by Russia."

"Revolution is indeed a violent process. But if it is to result only in a change of dictatorship, in a shifting of names and political personalities, then it is hardly worth while. It is surely not worth all the struggle and sacrifice, the stupendous loss in human life and cultural values that result from every revolution. If such a revolution were even to bring greater social well being (which has not been the case in Russia) then it would also not be worth the terrific price paid: mere improvement can be brought about without bloody revolution."

"The dominant, almost general, idea of revolution — particularly the Socialist idea — is that revolution is a violent change of social conditions through which one social class, the working class, becomes dominant over another class, the capitalist class. It is the conception of a purely physical change, and as such it involves only political scene shifting and institutional rearrangements. Bourgeois dictatorship is replaced by the "dictatorship of the proletariat" — or by that of its "advance guard," the Communist Party. Lenin takes the seat of the Romanovs, the Imperial Cabinet is rechristened Soviet of People's Commissars, Trotsky is appointed Minister of War, and a labourer becomes the Military Governor General of Moscow. That is, in essence, the Bolshevik conception of revolution, as translated into actual practice."

"The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevail."