Table Of ContentRed Emma Speaks
An Emma Goldman Reader
Third Edition
Compiled and Edited by
Alix Kates Shulman
F M F N
OR ARGARET LUTE AND AOMI
W E
EISSTEIN, IN WHOM MMA’S SPIRIT
LIVES ON.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword to the 1996 Edition
Emma Goldman’s Feminism: A Reappraisal
Biographical Introduction
PART ONE: ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY
Preface to Part One
What I Believe
Anarchism: What It Really Stands For
Minorities Versus Majorities
Syndicalism: Its Theory and Practice
Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap
The Individual, Society and the State
PART TWO: SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
Preface to Part Two
The Child and Its Enemies
The Social Importance of the Modern School
The Hypocrisy of Puritanism
The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation
Victims of Morality
The Traffic in Women
Woman Suffrage
Marriage and Love
Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure
Intellectual Proletarians
The Failure of Christianity
The Philosophy of Atheism
PART THREE: VIOLENCE
Preface to Part Three
The Psychology of Political Violence
What We Did About the Slaughter at Homestead
The Assassination of McKinley
Outrage at San Diego
Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure
Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter
Address to the Jury
PART FOUR: TWO REVOLUTIONS AND A SUMMARY
Preface to Part Four
Afterword to My Disillusionment in Russia
There Is No Communism in Russia
Address to the International Working Men’s Association Congress
Was My Life Worth Living?
List of Sources
Index
Foreword to the
1996 Edition
As the twentieth century winds down, one of its most fascinating characters,
Emma Goldman (1869–1940), after decades of bleak obscurity following her
death, is once again a vital force—at least among feminists, leftists, and devotees
of U.S. history. In the wake of the second wave of feminism, which embraced
Goldman as a hero, she and her works have been studied, researched, archived,
and enshrined on microfilm in libraries throughout the world. Dr. Candace Falk
and her staff at the Emma Goldman Papers Project of the University of
California at Berkeley have labored for more than a decade to collect and
archive every last scrap of Goldman manuscript, correspondence, likeness, and
memorabilia that might illuminate her life—including even her personal recipe
for blintzes. As a result of this work of devotion and scholarship, Red Emma
Goldman now presides over a permanent banquet in scholar heaven.*
Yet the hungers of ordinary readers who may wish to savor Goldman’s work
are different from those of the specialized scholar. It is to such readers that I
offer Red Emma Speaks—still the only work I know to present in a single handy
volume the full sweep of Goldman’s opinions and personality. In addition to
nine essays Goldman herself selected for her 1910 Anarchism and Other Essays
(New York: Mother Earth Publishing Co.), three dramatic sections from her
autobiography, Living My Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), and the
afterword to her My Disillusionment in Russia (New York: Doubleday, Page &
Co., 1923, 1924), which the collapse of the Soviet Union has revealed as
prescient, there are sixteen more pieces covering a great range of subjects,
together here for the first time and offering, I believe, a rich borscht of
Goldman’s life and thought.
The first edition of Red Emma Speaks (1972), with its biographical sketch,
introduced Goldman to a new generation. The second edition (1985), enlarged to
serve an exploding interest in women’s studies, added three more essays plus my
own assessment of Goldman’s feminism. The present, third edition (1996) has
been revised to situate the essays more precisely in light of a burgeoning
Goldman scholarship, with the generous assistance of Candace Falk, who shares
responsibility only for textual improvements and not for any remaining errors.
Bibliographical information on the essays in this volume can be found in the
introductions to each of the four parts, as well as in the newly added source list.
For those whose appetite is further stimulated by this selection, sixty-nine reels
of The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition are available for study in
most major research libraries, as is the companion guide in book form, Emma
Goldman: A Guide to Her Life and Documentary Sources, excerpts of which can
be retrieved on the Internet through the University of California gopher.
Bon appétit!
Alix Kates Shulman
*Candace Falk, with Ronald J. Zboray et al., eds., The Emma Goldman Papers: A Microfilm Edition
(Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1990); and the companion guide to these materials, Candace
Falk, with Stephen Cole and Sally Thomas, eds., Emma Goldman: A Guide to Her Life and Documentary
Sources (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1995).
Emma Goldman’s
Feminism: A Reappraisal
Red Emma Goldman. By the time she was deported to Russia along with 248
others in the shameful Red Scare of 1919, Emma Goldman’s name was a
household word. In the first decades of this century, the notorious revolutionary
was known as the Queen of the Anarchists and the Most Dangerous Woman in
the World. During her thirty years as an anarchist agitator, labor champion, free
speech activist, and birth control advocate, the notorious Red Emma was feared
as a promoter of violence, free love, and anarchy. This outspoken enemy of
capitalism, the state, and the family was arrested so often that she never spoke in
public without taking along a book to read in jail. The radical journal she
founded in 1906 and edited until 1918, Mother Earth, was once suppressed by
the government because of an article she wrote on prostitution. A brilliant and
fearless speaker, during her career she was arrested uncounted times and three
times imprisoned: once for allegedly inciting to riot at a workers’ rally, once for
instructing a large audience in the use of contraceptives, and once for conspiring,
on the eve of World War I, to obstruct the draft. And even after she was
deported, she managed to make a comeback to public consciousness in the
thirties through her sensational autobiography, Living My Life.
Nevertheless, by the time I decided to write about her in the late sixties, her
books were all long out of print and few people I knew had ever heard her name.
But in the decades since—years which saw the growth of feminism from a tiny
handful of activists to a sprawling, diverse, embattled mass movement—Emma
Goldman’s name has re-emerged from obscurity to become a veritable password
of radical feminism. Her works rose from the limbo of being out of print to the
heaven of being available in paperback. Her face began appearing on T-shirts,
her name on posters, her words on banners. An Emma Goldman Clinic for
