Emma Goldman, American anarchist and feminist, advocate of free speech, birth control, and the eight-hour work day, was arrested in New York City on February 11, 1916—just prior to giving another public lecture on family planning. She was charged with violating the Comstock Act, an 1873 law banning transportation of “obscene” matter through the mail or across state lines. At the time, federal courts interpreted the act as prohibiting distribution of information about contraception.
[W]hen a law has outgrown time and necessity, it must go and the only way to get rid of the law, is to awaken the public to the fact that it has outlived its purposes and that is precisely what I have been doing and mean to do in the future.
Emma Goldman to “the Press,” February 15, 1916. The Emma Goldman PapersExternal, University of California Berkeley LibraryExternal.
Goldman was born on June 27, 1869, in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire; by the time she was twelve, her family had moved to St. Petersburg. Like most Eastern European Jews, Goldman’s family suffered under the political oppression and anti-Semitism of imperial Russia. She fled Russia with her sister Helena in 1885, settling in Rochester, New York, where they were soon joined by the rest of their family.
In Rochester, Goldman worked in a garment factory and was briefly married to a fellow laborer and Russian immigrant. Disillusioned with working conditions, she quickly became energized by the growing labor movement. Her acceptance of anarchism–the belief that any form of government is unnecessary and undesirable–grew from the persecution of anarchist and labor leaders during the Haymarket Affair of 1886-87. Following labor protests in Chicago that turned violent, eight anarchists were convicted of bomb throwing without hard evidence, based on the radical content of their writings and speeches; four of the eight were hanged amid broad public outrage. The designation of May Day (May 1) as an international labor holiday commemorated the Haymarket tragedy.
By 1889, Goldman had moved to New York City. Her abilities as a speaker and writer contributed to her prominence among an international group of political radicals. In the 1890s, Goldman worked as a nurse and a midwife among poor immigrants in New York City’s Lower East Side. She campaigned for legalized birth control, believing that contraception was essential to women’s social, sexual, and economic freedom. Emma Goldman was arrested twice (1915 and 1916) and imprisoned once (1916) for lecturing and distributing material in support of birth control.
Goldman was also, in these years, involved in a variety of anarchist activities, ranging from direct actions to lectures to publications such as her Anarchism and Other Essays of 1910. As a co-founder of the No-Conscription LeagueExternal, in 1917 Goldman was again arrested—this time for speaking against the selective draft law. After two years in prison in Missouri, she was deported to Russia in 1919 along with several hundred other radical immigrants. Goldman lived and worked in Russia until 1921, when she left, disillusioned with the Russian Revolution.
Exiled from the United States, Emma Goldman traveled through Europe, delivering lectures as an advocate of anarchism and individual freedom. She lived for a time in St. Tropez, France, where she wrote her memoir, Living My Life of 1931; and in Toronto, Canada, where she died in 1940. Though banned in her lifetime, Emma Goldman returned to the United States for her final resting place: she is buried in a Chicago cemetery near the monument erected for the Haymarket Martyrs.
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