Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader PDF
Preview Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader
Red 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
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