Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman was an anarchist political activist and writer. She was born in Kaunas, Russian Empire, to a Jewish family. She emigrated to the United States in 1885. Goldman was imprisoned several times for inciting to riot and illegally distributing information about birth control.

About Emma Goldman in brief

Summary Emma GoldmanEmma Goldman was an anarchist political activist and writer. Born in Kaunas, Russian Empire, to a Jewish family, Goldman emigrated to the United States in 1885. Attracted to anarchism after the Chicago Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women’s rights, and social issues. She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for inciting to riot and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Goldman traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto, Canada, on May 14, 1940, aged 70. During her life, Goldman was lionized as a freethinking \”rebel woman\” by admirers, and denounced by detractors as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. After decades of obscurity, Goldman gained iconic status in the 1970s when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest. She wrote an autobiography called Living My Life, which was published in two volumes, in 1931 and 1935. In 1923, Goldman published a book about her experiences in Russia, My Disillusionment in Russia.

She left the Soviet Union and in 1923 published an autobiography about her experience in the country. She was married to Abraham Goldman, with whom she had three sons. Her father used violence to punish his children, beating them when they disobeyed him. He used a whip on Emma, the most rebellious of them. Her mother provided scarce comfort, rarely calling on Abraham to tone down his beatings. When Emma was a young girl, she moved to the village of Papilė, where her father ran an inn. At the age of seven, she became friends with a servant named Petrushka, who excited her erotic sensations. Later she moved with her family to the town of Moisil, Prussian Prussia, where she lived with her sisters, Louis and Herman. She later moved to New York City, and she wrote about her time in New York in her memoirs, “Living My Life” (1930). She later wrote that she had a daughter, but their first child was Emma, who was born on June 27, 1869. Goldman later speculated that her father’s furious temper was at least partly a result of sexual frustration. Goldman’s relationships with her elder half-sisters, Helena and Lena, were a distant and uncharitable, but she filled Goldman’s childhood with joy; she filled their lives with their study in their study. She witnessed a peasant being whipped with a knout in the street in the 18th century. In 1885, Goldman and her sisters became friends.