Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman was born in 1869 in Kovno, now Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, and emigrated to the United States in 1885. Drawn to anarchism by the Haymarket affair, she became a popular lecturer in English, German and Yiddish. In 1906 she founded the magazine Mother Earth. She was jailed several times, including in 1893 for inciting to riot and in 1917, when she and Alexander Berkman were convicted under the Espionage Act for organizing against conscription. Deported to Soviet Russia in 1919, she left in despair after the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, later worked for the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and died in Toronto in 1940.

Admirers see Goldman as a pioneer of free speech, birth control and sexual freedom, and as one of the earliest left-wing critics of Soviet authoritarianism. Her lectures and writings on prisons, marriage and patriotism reached large audiences. Critics then and since focused on her ties to political violence. In 1892 she helped plan Berkman's attempt to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick, and she publicly defended Leon Czolgosz after he shot President McKinley in 1901, though no evidence linked her to that plot. Fear of anarchist violence made her a target of the authorities, and after her 1919 release from prison she was re-arrested on the order of J. Edgar Hoover and deported. Her rejection of the vote also set her apart from the mainstream women's movement.