The Undeservedly Obscure Dead

Today: Emma Goldman (1869-1940)

Ms. Goldman was an anarchist, a first-wave feminist, labor adovcate (she used to do speeched for the IWW), social revolutionary, and an all around cool chick. Though she would have decked me for calling her that--and rightfully so.

Here various and sundry words are shockingly reasonable, which one doesn't oftend expect from Lithuanian-born turn-of-the-century anarchists, but I'm beginning to think that we should get more of those. She believed birth control was a human right, and that if you wanted to limit abortion, you should help poor women afford child care. She was jailed in 1893 for telling people to, "Ask for work. If they do not give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, take bread."
J. Edgar Hoover called her, "One of the most dangerous women in America."

I'm not advocating anarchy. But one must remember that in Goldman's time anarchy wasn't a bunch of spoiled white kids who don't think that they should have to pay rent or listen to their mothers tell them to go to business school...it was a social movement that advocated a sort of direct, localized, social democracy. I still think that the movement had it's problems. But all that just makes Emma Goldman's good sense and balanced ideas that much more breathtaking. Her goal wasn't violent overthrow, but a peaceful liberation of the human spirit (pace her portrayal in E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime). It's also a pretty convincing (and sad) argument for why we don't read more about her in the history books. She's the person who once said that, "If voting accompished anything, they'd make it illegal." And while that was surely an overly cynical statement, she gives voice to an anxiety about American civic life that has never really been addressed.

But she also said some far less cyncal things. Let's hear from her 1931 memoir Living My Life:
"The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society."

Splendid. Emma Goldmann, we salute you.