Emma Goldman: “The Philosophy of Atheism”

About the Author

Emma Goldman was born on June 27, 1869, in Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania, which was then part of the Russian Empire. Kovno was part of the area Empress Catherine II had set aside in 1791 for Jewish settlement after the Russian annexation of Poland. Goldman’s father, Abraham, was an Orthodox Jew, and although her mother, Taube, belonged to a more liberal tradition, Emma grew up in a conservative Jewish family in a context of persistent anti-Semitism. Her autobiography recounts a childhood that was often difficult under a father who was stern, distant, and sometimes abusive.

By her account, her Jewish background—particularly in the anti-Semitic context of czarist Russia—was important to her anarchism. First, it gave her reason to be suspicious of electoral politics (when her father lost an election because, as he explained, he was Jewish and the winner gave more vodka). Second, it gave her firsthand experience of the brutality of militarism. Emma’s formal schooling in Königsberg ended when she moved with her family to Saint Petersburg in 1881. But her education continued, as it did throughout her life. She was introduced to radical literature by her sister Helena, and she grew familiar with Russian revolutionary movements during the four years she spent in Saint Petersburg. In December 1885, she immigrated to the United States, settling first in Rochester, where her older sister Lena had already moved. Pressured into an unhappy marriage in 1887, she divorced and moved to New Haven, Connecticut, ten months later. She returned briefly to Rochester for health reasons, remarried and divorced a second time, and then moved to New York City.

She begins her autobiography with her arrival in New York at the age of twenty, on August 15, 1889. On her arrival, she settled on the Lower East Side, where she met Johann Most and Alexander Berkman. Most, editor of Die Freiheit (“Freedom”), became Goldman’s mentor. Most began publication of Die Freiheit in London, where he continued to publish it until he was expelled from the Social Democratic Party as a result of differences with Marx over the role of the state. Most went to New York at the invitation of the Social Revolutionary Club and resumed publication there. It was Most who first encouraged Goldman to begin speaking in public. She went on her first tour in 1890, speaking in Yiddish. She later said that her experience on the tour cured her of her “childlike faith” in the “infallibility” of her teacher and taught her the importance of thinking independently.

Although the tour was not entirely successful, it made her aware that she could sway people with words—and that led to her becoming one of the most influential spokespersons for anarchism in the United States in the twentieth century. Her association with Berkman, which developed from a love affair into a lifelong friendship, led indirectly to her imprisonment at Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary for incitement to riot. Her year there gave her time to read and also provided an opportunity for formal training as a nurse. That training and her work with fellow prisoners improved her English so that she was ready to move beyond the Yiddish-speaking audience by the time she resumed her lectures after her release. Her medical training in prison prompted her to travel to Vienna for further study. There she heard Sigmund Freud lecture and continued to develop connections with radical thinkers in Europe.

Goldman spoke and wrote on a variety of issues, all determined by her fierce defense of individuals threatened by institutional power, all connected by her commitment to anarchism: the rights of workers, the rights of women (including outspoken advocacy of birth control), the right to refuse conscription into the military. She was a consistent critic of militarism, and it was her opposition to U.S. entry into World War I that led to her arrest and imprisonment in 1917; under the Immigration Act of 1918, which expanded the provisions of the 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act, she was deported to Russia in 1919. She never wavered in her support for the Russian Revolution, but she grew disillusioned with the Bolsheviks for what she saw as their statism, or support for extensive state controls, and she wrote a critical account after she left Russia. She lived the last years of her life in exile in Germany, Britain, and France and continued to write and speak on issues including the Spanish Civil War. She died in Toronto in 1940 and was buried near the Haymarket martyrs in Waldheim cemetery, just outside Chicago.