Emma Goldman was a well-known radical critic of capitalism, the state, religion, patriarchy and colonialism during the fertile political years at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. For over a half century, she articulated an anarchist vision of a strong, free, self-creating individual within an egalitarian, participatory society. While anarchists are often dismissed as the lunatic fringe of the Left, Goldman presented anarchism as the most practical approach to human liberation. She emphasized concrete and creative anarchist activities, including cooperatives, radical schools, labor actions, and publications, which showed anarchism in action.
Goldman was born in Kovno, Lithuania, into an economically insecure Jewish family. Her brief formal education was enhanced by exposure to nihilist revolutionaries and Russian radical literature. Immigrating with her sister to the United States in 1885, she settled originally in Rochester, New York. Like many young people of her generation, she was galvanized politically by the trial and execution of several young anarchists who were framed for the killing of police at the Haymarket riots in Chicago in 1886. She subsequently moved to New York City and joined the anarchist movement, rapidly rising to become one of the best known speakers in the lively radical landscape of the time. She was arrested countless times – legend has it that she took a book with her to her own lectures so she would have something to read in jail – and served three terms in prison: one year for urging unemployed workers to “take bread,” a few weeks for providing information on preventing conception, and two years for opposing conscription during World War I. After her third prison term, she and her comrade Alexander Berkman, along with 247 other radicals, were sent into exile to the newly-formed U.S.S.R. Initially supporting the Bolsheviks, she soon came to view the Communist Party as the murderers of the revolution. She and Berkman left Russia and eventually settled in the south of France. Goldman continued her lecturing and writing in Europe, England, and Canada; she strongly supported the anarchist revolutionaries in Spain in the 1930s, and was still an active speaker, writer and agitator when she died following a stroke in 1940.