Emma Goldman's father burned her French book; she became a famous lecturer
As a teenager in Saint Petersburg, Emma Goldman begged to go back to school, and her father threw her French textbook into the fire. She educated herself anyway, emigrated to America in 1885 and became a renowned anarchist speaker, drawing thousands until the government deported her in 1919.
Goldman was born on June 27, 1869, in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, to an Orthodox Jewish family. Her mother, Taube, had lost her first husband to tuberculosis; the second match, with Abraham Goldman, was arranged and unhappy from the start, and his business soon failed with her inheritance. Abraham disciplined his children harshly, Emma most of all as the most rebellious. Her half-sister Helena gave her whatever warmth her childhood held.
The family moved often. In the village of Papilė, where her father kept an inn, she saw a peasant flogged in the street, an image that stayed with her. At seven she went to school in Königsberg and fought back against a teacher who preyed on girls, who was then dismissed. In Saint Petersburg her father opened one failing shop after another, and she worked jobs including one in a corset shop. She read on her own, followed the upheaval after the assassination of Alexander II, and found a model in the heroine of Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? When her father tried to marry her off at fifteen, she declared she would marry only for love.
In the United States, the Haymarket affair in Chicago drew her to anarchism. She lectured and wrote on anarchism, women's rights and social questions, covering prisons, atheism, free speech, militarism, marriage, free love and homosexuality. Admirers hailed her as a freethinking rebel woman; critics accused her of endorsing political murder and violent revolution.
In 1917 she and her comrade Alexander Berkman were jailed for two years for conspiring to discourage men from registering for the new military draft. After their release they were caught in the Palmer Raids along with 248 others during the First Red Scare, and in December 1919 both were shipped off to Russia. She died on May 14, 1940.
Source: Emma Goldman
