Emma Goldman, Anarchist, Anti-WW I Activist, Feminist, Birth Control Advocate, Dies
Emma Goldman was a famous anarchist, anti-war activist, feminist, and birth control advocate in the early years of the twentieth century. In 1906 she founded a magazine, Mother Earth, which became a vehicle for ideas about anarchism, birth control, and other radical issues. The Post Office banned it from the mails in 1917 (September 26, 1917).
After the U.S. entered World War I, she founded the No Conscription League to oppose the draft. She was arrested on May 18, 1917, and later deported from the United States and sent to the new Soviet Union, on December 21, 1919.
She fled the Soviet Union in December 1921, one jump ahead of the Soviet secret police, because of her criticisms of the government there. Barred from the U.S., she lived in France and other countries until her death in Toronto, Canada.
Partly through the efforts of Roger Baldwin, director of the ACLU, the State Department allowed her body to enter the U.S., and she was buried in the Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago.
Read: Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile (1989)
Learn more at the Emma Goldman Archives: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/goldman/
Read: Vivian Gornick, Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life (2011)
See Emma Goldman’s 1901 mug shot here
Visit Emma’s Grave at the Forest Home Cemetery (formerly the German Waldheim Cemetery), in Forest Park, IL, a western suburb of Chicago: http://www.foresthomecemetary.net/index.html