bebatjof 🇵🇸Emma Goldman was born in a Jewish family in Lithuania, which was a part of Russia then. First they moved to Koeningsberg (Kaliningrad), at the time part of the German Empire, and then to Saint-Petersburg. Both at home and in school she was frequently punished with violence for being disobedient. As a teenager she was forced to work due to her family's poverty, turning her into an autodidact.
She was raped at age 15 by a customer of her workplace.
#EmmaGoldman
#EmmaGoldman
She migrated with her half sister to the US at age 16, joining her other half sister and husband who already lived there. A year later, her parents and younger brothers also joined. They lived in upstate New York.
She had a monotonous job as a seamstress in a shop.
At work, she met her first husband, who also liked reading, dancing and traveling. They married after four months, but the relationship completely changed after moving in together. He was impotent and threatened her with violence and self-harm in case she would leave him. After a year she left anyway but her parents called her a loose woman and didn't let her move in with them, so she left for New York City with 5 dollars and her sewing machine.
On her first day in New York City, Goldman met Alexander Berkman and Johann Most at a gathering place for radicals.
Goldman started a lifelong relationship with Berkman. Most took her under his wings and mentored her in public speaking, but they soon had a fallout.
In 1892 a strike broke out in a steel factory in Homestead, just out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The strike got nationwide support. Goldman and Berkman set up a plan to assassinate the factory manager, hoping to inspire the workers to revolt against the capitalist system.
Berkman was supposed to be the gunman and Goldman was staying behind to explain the motive and spread their ideals. She briefly prostituted herself to fund the scheme.
Berkman managed to shoot the factory boss but it didn't kill him, and Berkman was sentenced 22 years in prison for attempted murder. The police didn't find proof that Goldman was complicit, so she walked free. Goldman suffered during Berkman's absence.
The action was widely condemned by workers and anarchists, including Most, their former friend and mentor.
In 1893 the United States suffered one of its worst economic crises. Goldman gave several speeches in public, telling the working class to take action against the rich. She was arrested for inciting riots and got sentenced to one year in prison.
In prison she suffered a rheumatism attack so she got sent to the infirmary where she befriended the doctor. She received informal nursing training and read a lot. When she got out, a crowd of 3000 people greeted her, and she started getting requests for lectures and interviews.
Goldman wanted to study midwifery and massage but couldn't do so in the US so she went back to Europe, funding her trip with lectures. She met with revolutionaries like Errico Malatesta, Louise Michel, and Peter Kropotkin. After receiving her diploma of midwifery in Vienna she went back to the US to put it into practice.
In 1901 U.S. president W. McKinley was shot and killed by an anarchist called Czolgosz. During interrogation Czolgosz claimed to be inspired by Goldman, which led to her arrest for "assassination plans". However, Czolgosz and Goldman didn't know each other at all, on the contrary, Czolgosz had tried to get in contact with her, but she thought he was an infiltrator. After two weeks of detention Goldman was set free and Czolgosz got convicted of murder. During this entire time Goldman had refused to condemn Czolgosz' actions, which completely isolated her from the anarchist movement.
Goldman took a break from activism focusing on midwifery, but a few years later the anarchist movement revived and she started campaigning again. She started a magazine in 1906, 'Mother Earth', with her original writings and reprints of famous revolutionaries like Proudhon, Kropotkin and Wollstonecraft.
In the same year Berkman was finally released from prison. He was in bad health and at first he struggled to readjust to life outside. However, when Goldman was arrested for meeting with other anarchists, he got so angry for this violation of freedom of assembly that he found his will to live again. Their relationship did fumble, and Berkman had an affair with a 15yo (him being 37). A year later Goldman had an affair (with someone her age).
For the following ten years Goldman held lectures, published writings, and campaigned for the anarchist cause. She collected a series of speeches and essays she had written for Mother Earth and published a book titled Anarchism and Other Essays.
She supported Margaret Sanger who coined the term 'birth control' in 1914 and became an advocate of access to contraception herself. She was arrested and spent two weeks in jail in 1916 for spreading information about birth control methods.