Who Was Emma Goldman? The Original American Radical
Quick Answer
Who was Emma Goldman? Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was a Lithuanian-born anarchist, labor organizer, feminist, and writer who became one of the most influential radical voices in American history. She championed workers' rights, women's reproductive freedom, free speech, and opposition to war, and was deported from the United States in 1919 for her political beliefs. J. Edgar Hoover personally oversaw her deportation and called her one of the most dangerous women in America.
J. Edgar Hoover, the man who ran the FBI for 48 years, kept a file on Emma Goldman. He considered her one of the most dangerous women in America. She was a 5-foot-tall immigrant who wrote essays and gave speeches. Make of that what you will.
Where She Came From
Emma Goldman was born on June 27, 1869, in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. Her childhood was not gentle. Her father was volatile and authoritarian. Jewish life in Russia meant navigating poverty, official antisemitism, and the constant threat of pogroms. She emigrated to the United States in 1885 at the age of sixteen and went to work in the garment factories of Rochester, New York, where she earned $2.50 a week sewing overcoats for ten and a half hours a day.
She was radicalized by the Haymarket affair. In 1886, a labor rally in Chicago ended with a bomb thrown at police, and eight anarchist labor organizers were arrested. The evidence against most of them was nonexistent. Four were hanged. Goldman was seventeen years old when she read about it and concluded, as she later wrote, that the state would kill working people to protect property. She never revised that conclusion.
What She Actually Believed
Goldman was an anarchist, which in her time meant something specific: the belief that hierarchical authority, whether state, church, or capital, corrupts both the people who hold it and the people subjected to it. She was not interested in seizing state power and redirecting it. She wanted to dismantle the structures that made coercion possible in the first place.
That framework led her everywhere. She fought for the eight-hour workday and the right to organize. She was among the first prominent voices in America to advocate for birth control and women's reproductive autonomy, years before Margaret Sanger became a household name. She defended free speech for people she disagreed with on the principle that speech suppressed by the state tends to be speech the powerful find inconvenient. She opposed World War I, which cost her two years in federal prison. She spoke openly about sexual freedom and LGBTQ rights at a time when the words for those things barely existed in public discourse.
She also founded and edited Mother Earth, a political magazine that ran from 1906 to 1917 and published essays, poetry, and reporting from the American radical left. She ran it while touring the country giving lectures, while being surveilled by federal agents, and while being arrested on a semi-regular basis.
The Part Where the Government Deported Her
By 1917, Goldman had been arrested so many times that prosecutors largely stopped bothering. The Espionage Act changed that. Passed in 1917 to suppress opposition to WWI, it made it illegal to obstruct military recruitment. Goldman gave speeches against the draft. She was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to two years in federal prison.
When she was released in 1919, J. Edgar Hoover, then a young Justice Department attorney building his career on prosecuting radicals, personally supervised her deportation case. On December 21, 1919, Goldman and 248 others were loaded onto a ship called the Buford, which the press nicknamed the "Red Ark," and deported to Russia. Hoover showed up at the dock to watch them leave. Goldman reportedly asked him if he was there to say goodbye. He was not.
Russia Did Not Work Out
Goldman arrived in Russia in the middle of the Bolshevik Revolution and was initially hopeful. She had spent decades fighting for workers and believed, briefly, that she was watching workers actually take power. That belief did not survive contact with how the Bolsheviks actually operated.
She watched the new Soviet government crush dissent, imprison anarchists, and use the same mechanisms of state violence she had spent her life opposing, just pointed in a different direction. When the Red Army violently suppressed the Kronstadt sailors' rebellion in 1921, sailors who had been among the most committed revolutionaries, Goldman left. She co-wrote "My Disillusionment in Russia" in 1923. It was not well received by the American left, which was still romanticizing the revolution. She published it anyway.
Spain and the End
Goldman spent her final years largely in exile, moving between England, France, and Canada, stateless and unwelcome in most of the countries where her politics might have found an audience. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, she went to Barcelona. The Spanish anarchist movement was the largest in the world, and for a brief period it looked like anarchism might actually work at scale. She organized, wrote, and fundraised from London on behalf of the Spanish Republic until Franco won.
She died in Toronto on May 14, 1940, at the age of seventy, having been denied reentry to the United States until after her death. Her body was allowed back in. She is buried in Chicago near the Haymarket martyrs who radicalized her when she was seventeen. The resistance she embodied did not stop with her. The organized anti-fascist movement she was part of in the 1930s has a longer history than most people know.
Goldman's whole life was an argument that the personal and the political are the same thing. What you wear, what you say, what you refuse to stay quiet about: it all counts. Our Hex The Patriarchy T-shirt and Fall Of Fascism T-shirt exist in that tradition. Browse the full Activism collection if you want to wear something Goldman would have approved of.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Emma Goldman?
Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was an anarchist, labor organizer, feminist, writer, and lecturer who became one of the most prominent radical voices in American history. Born in Lithuania, she emigrated to the United States at sixteen and was radicalized by the execution of labor organizers in the Haymarket affair. She spent decades fighting for workers' rights, women's reproductive freedom, free speech, and anti-militarism before being deported in 1919.
What did Emma Goldman believe?
Goldman was an anarchist who believed that concentrated authority, whether state, religious, or corporate, was inherently oppressive. She advocated for workers' rights, birth control and reproductive freedom, free speech, sexual liberation, and opposition to war. She was also one of the earliest public voices in America to defend LGBTQ rights. Her politics were not a menu she picked from selectively. She believed all of these positions followed from the same underlying principle: that people should control their own lives.
Why was Emma Goldman deported?
Goldman was deported in 1919 under the Espionage Act after serving two years in prison for opposing military conscription during World War I. J. Edgar Hoover personally supervised her deportation case. She was put on a ship with 248 other deportees and sent to Russia. The U.S. government did not allow her to return during her lifetime. Her body was brought back after her death in 1940.
What is the "If I can't dance" Emma Goldman quote?
The quote most commonly attributed to Goldman is: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." She never wrote or said it in exactly those words. The sentiment is a paraphrase of passages from her autobiography in which she pushed back against the idea that radicals had to be humorless and self-denying. The paraphrase became popular because it captures something real about how she actually approached political life, which is probably why it stuck.
What was Emma Goldman's connection to anarchism?
Goldman was one of the most prominent anarchist thinkers and organizers in American history. She edited the anarchist journal Mother Earth for eleven years, lectured across the country on anarchist philosophy, and influenced generations of labor and feminist activists. Her anarchism was not abstract. It was grounded in her direct experience of factory work, state violence, and the conditions that produced both. She believed anarchism was the logical conclusion of taking human freedom seriously.
What happened to Emma Goldman after she was deported to Russia?
Goldman arrived in Russia hopeful about the Bolshevik Revolution but quickly became disillusioned. She witnessed the suppression of dissent, the imprisonment of anarchists, and the violent crushing of the Kronstadt sailors' rebellion in 1921. She left and co-wrote "My Disillusionment in Russia" in 1923. She spent the rest of her life in exile in England, France, and Canada, working on behalf of the Spanish Republic during the Civil War and continuing to write and lecture until her death in Toronto in 1940.
