Emma Goldman. Courier Corporation, Jan 1, - Literary Criticism - pages. 4 Reviews. Twelve essays by the influential radical include "Marriage and Love," "The Hypocrisy of Puritanism," "The 3/5(4) Emma Goldman: Guide to Her Life and Documentary Sources; Primary Sources. Goldman's Writings from Books. Anarchism & Other Essays by Goldman; The Social Significance of the Modern Drama; My Disillusionment in Russia; Living My Life; Published Essays & Pamphlets by Goldman; Speeches by Goldman & Others; New York Times & Third Party Accounts Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (Third revised edition, New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, ) ANARCHISM: WHAT IT REALLY STANDS FOR ANARCHY. Ever reviled, accursed, ne'er understood, Thou art the grisly terror of our age. "Wreck of all order," cry the multitude, "Art thou, and war and murder's endless rage." O, let them cry
Anarchism and Other Essays | The Anarchist Library
Biographical Sketch. Chapter 1: Anarchism: What It Really Stands for. Chapter 2: Minorities Versus Majorities, emma goldman anarchism and other essays. Chapter 3: The Psychology of Political Violence, emma goldman anarchism and other essays. Chapter 4: Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure. Chapter 5: Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty. Chapter 6: Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School.
Chapter 7: The Hypocrisy of Puritanism. Chapter 8: The Traffic in Women. Chapter 9: Woman Suffrage. Chapter Marriage and Love. Chapter The Modern Drama: A Powerful Disseminator of Radical Thought. The motives of any persons to pursue such a profession must be different from those of trade, deeper than pride, and stronger than interest. Among the men and women prominent in the public life of America there are but few whose names are mentioned as often as that of Emma Goldman. Yet the real Emma Goldman is almost quite unknown.
The sensational press has surrounded her name with so much misrepresentation and slander, it would seem almost a miracle that, in spite of this web of calumny, the truth breaks through and a better appreciation of this much maligned idealist begins to manifest itself. There is but little consolation in the fact that almost every representative of a new idea has had to struggle and suffer under similar difficulties.
Is it of any avail that a former president of a republic pays homage at Osawatomie to the memory of John Brown? Or that the president of another republic participates in the unveiling of a statue in honor of Pierre Proudhon, and holds up his life to the French nation as a model worthy of enthusiastic emulation? Of what avail is all this when, at the same time, the living John Browns and Proudhons are being crucified? The honor and glory of a Mary Wollstonecraft or of a Louise Michel are not enhanced by the City Fathers of London or Paris naming a street after them — the living generation should be concerned with doing justice to the living Mary Wollstonecrafts and Louise Michels.
Posterity assigns to men like Wendel Phillips and Lloyd Garrison the proper niche of honor in the temple of human emancipation; but it is the duty of their contemporaries to bring them due recognition and appreciation while they live.
The path of the propagandist of social justice is strewn with thorns. The powers of darkness and injustice exert all their might lest a ray of sunshine enter his cheerless life. Nay, even his comrades in the struggle — indeed, too often his most intimate friends — show but little understanding for the personality of the pioneer. Envy, sometimes growing to hatred, vanity and jealousy, obstruct his way and fill his heart with sadness.
It requires an inflexible will and tremendous enthusiasm not to lose, under such emma goldman anarchism and other essays, all faith in the Cause. The representative of a revolutionizing idea stands between two fires: on the one hand, the persecution of the existing powers which hold him responsible for all acts resulting from social conditions; and, on the other, the lack of understanding on the part of his own followers who often judge all his activity from a narrow standpoint.
Thus it happens that the agitator stands quite alone emma goldman anarchism and other essays the midst of the multitude surrounding him. Even his most intimate friends rarely understand how solitary and deserted he feels. That is the tragedy of the person prominent in the public eye, emma goldman anarchism and other essays.
The mist in which the name of Emma Goldman has so long been enveloped is gradually beginning to dissipate. Her energy in the furtherance of such an unpopular idea as Anarchism, her deep earnestness, her courage and abilities, find growing understanding and admiration. The debt American intellectual growth owes to the revolutionary exiles has never been fully appreciated. The seed disseminated by them, though so little understood at the time, has brought a rich harvest.
They have at all times held aloft the banner of liberty, thus impregnating the social vitality of the Nation. But very few have succeeded in preserving their European education and culture while at the same time assimilating themselves with American life. Emma Goldman is one of the few who, while thoroughly preserving their individuality, have become an important factor in the social and intellectual atmosphere of America.
The life she leads is rich in color, full of change and variety. She has risen to the topmost heights, and she has also tasted the bitter dregs of life, emma goldman anarchism and other essays. Emma Goldman was born of Jewish parentage on the 27 th day of June,in the Russian province of Kovno. Surely these parents never dreamed what unique position their child would some day occupy. Like all emma goldman anarchism and other essays parents they, too, were quite convinced that their daughter would marry a respectable citizen, bear him children, and round out her allotted years surrounded by a flock emma goldman anarchism and other essays grandchildren, emma goldman anarchism and other essays, a good, religious woman.
As most parents, they had no inkling what a strange, impassioned spirit would take hold of the soul of their child, and carry it to the heights which separate generations in eternal struggle. They lived in a land and at a time when antagonism between parent and offspring was fated to find its most emma goldman anarchism and other essays expression, irreconcilable hostility. In this tremendous struggle between fathers and sons — and especially between parents and daughters — there was no compromise, no weak yielding, no truce.
The spirit of liberty, of progress — an idealism which knew no considerations and recognized no obstacles — drove the young generation out of the parental house and away from the hearth of the home. Just as this same spirit once drove out the revolutionary breeder of discontent, Jesus, and alienated him from his native traditions. What role the Jewish race — notwithstanding all anti-Semitic calumnies the race of transcendental idealism — played in the struggle of the Old and the New will probably never be appreciated with complete impartiality and clarity.
Only now we are beginning to perceive the tremendous debt we owe to Jewish idealists in the realm of science, emma goldman anarchism and other essays, art, and literature. But very little is still known of the important part the sons and daughters of Israel have played in the revolutionary movement and, especially, in that of modern times. The first years of her childhood Emma Goldman passed in a small, idyllic place in the German-Russian province of Kurland, where her father had charge of the government stage.
At that time Kurland was thoroughly German; even the Russian bureaucracy of that Baltic province was recruited mostly from German Junkers.
German fairy tales and stories, rich in the miraculous deeds of the heroic knights of Kurland, wove their spell over the youthful mind. But the beautiful idyl was of short duration. Soon the soul of the growing child was overcast by the dark shadows of life, emma goldman anarchism and other essays. Already in her tenderest youth the seeds of rebellion and unrelenting hatred of oppression were to be planted in the heart of Emma Goldman.
Early she learned to know the beauty of the State: she saw her father harassed by the Christian chinovniks and doubly persecuted as petty official and hated Jew. The brutality of forced conscription ever stood before her eyes: she beheld the young men, often the sole support of a large family, brutally dragged to the barracks to lead the miserable emma goldman anarchism and other essays of a soldier.
She heard the weeping of the poor peasant women, and witnessed the shameful scenes of official venality which relieved the rich from military service at the expense of the poor. She was outraged by the terrible treatment to which the female servants were subjected: maltreated and exploited by their barinyasthey fell to the tender mercies of the regimental officers, who regarded them as their natural sexual prey.
These girls, made pregnant by respectable gentlemen and driven out by their mistresses, often found refuge in the Goldman home. And the little girl, her heart palpitating with sympathy, would abstract coins from the parental drawer to clandestinely press the money into the hands of the unfortunate women.
At the age of seven little Emma was sent by her parents to her grandmother at Königsberg, the city of Immanuel Kant, in Eastern Prussia. Save for occasional interruptions, she remained there till her 13 th birthday.
The first years in these surroundings do not exactly belong to her happiest recollections. The grandmother, indeed, was very amiable, but the numerous aunts of the household were concerned more with the spirit of practical rather than pure reason, and the categoric imperative was applied all too frequently. The situation was changed when her parents migrated to Königsberg, and little Emma was relieved from her role of Cinderella.
She now regularly attended public school and also enjoyed the advantages of private instruction, customary in middle class life; French and music lessons played an important part in the curriculum. The future interpreter of Ibsen and Shaw was then a little German Gretchen, quite at home in the German atmosphere. Her special predilections in literature were the sentimental romances of Marlitt; she was a great admirer of the good Queen Louise, whom the bad Napoleon Buonaparte treated with so marked a lack of knightly chivalry, emma goldman anarchism and other essays.
What might have been her future development had she remained in this milieu? Fate — or was it economic necessity? Her parents decided to settle in St. Petersburg, the capital of the Almighty Tsar, and there to embark in business. It was here that a great change took place in the life of the young dreamer. It was an eventful period — the year of — in which Emma Goldman, then in her 13 th year, arrived in St. A struggle for life and death between the autocracy and the Russian intellectuals swept the country.
Alexander II had fallen the previous year. Sophia Perovskaia, Zheliabov, Grinevitzky, Rissakov, Kibalchitch, Michailov, the heroic executors of the death sentence upon the emma goldman anarchism and other essays, had then entered the Walhalla of immortality.
Jessie Helfman, the only regicide whose life the government had reluctantly spared because of pregnancy, followed the unnumbered Russian martyrs to the étapes of Siberia. It was the most heroic period in the great battle of emancipation, a battle for freedom such as the world had never witnessed before. The names of the Nihilist martyrs were on all lips, and thousands were enthusiastic to follow their example. The whole intelligenzia of Russia was filled with the illegal spirit: revolutionary sentiments penetrated into every home, from mansion to hovel, impregnating the military, the chinovniksfactory workers, and peasants.
The atmosphere pierced the very casemates of the royal palace. New ideas germinated in the youth. The difference of sex was forgotten. Shoulder to shoulder fought the men and the women.
The Russian woman! Who shall ever do justice or adequately portray her heroism and self-sacrifice, her loyalty and devotion? Holy, Turgeniev calls her in his great prose poem, emma goldman anarchism and other essays, On the Threshold. It was inevitable that the young dreamer from Königsberg should be drawn into the maelstrom.
To remain outside of the circle of free ideas meant a life of vegetation, of death. One need not wonder at the youthful age. Young enthusiasts were not then — and, fortunately, are not now — a rare phenomenon in Russia. The study of the Russian language soon brought young Emma Goldman in touch with revolutionary students and new ideas.
The place of Marlitt was taken by Nekrassov and Tchernishevsky. The quondam admirer of the good Queen Louise became a glowing enthusiast of liberty, resolving, like thousands of others, to devote her life to the emancipation of the people.
The struggle of generations now took place in the Goldman family.
ANARCHISM AND OTHER ESSAYS - Full AudioBook - Emma Goldman
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Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (Third revised edition, New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, ) ANARCHISM: WHAT IT REALLY STANDS FOR ANARCHY. Ever reviled, accursed, ne'er understood, Thou art the grisly terror of our age. "Wreck of all order," cry the multitude, "Art thou, and war and murder's endless rage." O, let them cry Emma Goldman: Guide to Her Life and Documentary Sources; Primary Sources. Goldman's Writings from Books. Anarchism & Other Essays by Goldman; The Social Significance of the Modern Drama; My Disillusionment in Russia; Living My Life; Published Essays & Pamphlets by Goldman; Speeches by Goldman & Others; New York Times & Third Party Accounts Emma Goldman. Courier Corporation, Jan 1, - Literary Criticism - pages. 4 Reviews. Twelve essays by the influential radical include "Marriage and Love," "The Hypocrisy of Puritanism," "The 3/5(4)
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