Named after Voltaire, sent to a convent, Voltairine de Cleyre became an anarchist
Her socialist father named her after Voltaire, then shipped her to a Catholic convent in Canada to curb her love of books. She called the three years a prison sentence, tried to run away, and came out a committed atheist. Voltairine de Cleyre went on to become one of America's leading anarchist writers.
She was born in 1866 in Leslie, Michigan, and grew up in severe poverty in St. Johns; her sister later blamed that hardship for her radicalism. Refused a place at school at age four for being too young, she taught herself to read and got in the following year. Byron shaped her early poetry. Behind the walls of the Sarnia convent, the nuns monitored her letters and isolated her as punishment, yet she also became fluent in French and learned piano, and for a while even considered becoming a Carmelite before doubt won out.
Her public life began in the freethought movement. In 1886 she edited a weekly freethought magazine in Grand Rapids, and crowds came to hear her tell of convent life, speeches she always read carefully from paper because she thought of herself as a writer rather than an orator. A lecture by Clarence Darrow in December 1887 turned her toward socialism, and debates with Jewish anarchists in Pittsburgh led her to anarchist theory. The Haymarket affair completed the shift. She first wanted the accused hanged, regretted it at once, and after four were executed following what she saw as a show trial, she embraced anarchism for life.
Philadelphia became home from 1889. She scraped a living teaching English to hundreds of Jewish immigrants, learned Yiddish well enough to write for the Yiddish anarchist press, and scolded its editor for altering her words in translation. She lived austerely, with few clothes and little food, which worsened a chronic illness. A lecture tour of Britain introduced her to Spanish anarchists and to anarchism without adjectives.
A former student, mentally ill, tried to kill her, and her health never fully recovered. After a spell of depression in which she lost faith in the cause, she moved to Chicago in 1910 to lecture on progressive education and cheered on the revolution in Mexico. After her death in 1912 she was laid to rest close to the Haymarket martyrs, then largely forgotten until biographers revived her work around the turn of the 21st century.
Source: Voltairine de Cleyre
