Where Radicalism Found a Home: Emma Goldman in the Village

At her prime, she was called “the most dangerous woman in America.” At her core, she was a Jewish Russian immigrant who relentlessly advocated for women’s equality, workers’ rights, free speech, and political reform. 

Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was an anarchist and activist at heart, a pivotal leader in the American progressive movement. And it was here—in our neighborhoods—that her radical vision found both a home and a stage.

Born June 27, 1869, in Kovno, Lithuania, to an Orthodox Jewish family, Goldman endured a rocky childhood with an abusive father and a mother who struggled with depression. After the assassination of Czar Alexander II, Goldman’s family moved to St. Petersburg, where she studied radical political ideologies, and began adopting the values of the Russian radicals, revolutionaries, and particularly anarchists. 

Tumult and poverty continued throughout Goldman’s teenage years, when, at sixteen, she left school to work as a seamstress in a corset shop to help support her family. While Goldman yearned for a life of education and liberation, her father sought for her a more domestic, tame one. In 1885, sixteen-year-old Goldman and her sister Helena emigrated to the United States — in part to escape her father’s abuse and his attempt at an arranged marriage, but also to seek respite and potential freedom. 

The sisters landed in Rochester, New York, in 1885. Quickly, Goldman began working in a garment factory and fell into a loveless marriage with one of her coworkers. While in Rochester, Goldman underwent her political awakening after learning about the brutal violence at a rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, where both demonstrators and police were killed. Disappointed by the grim realities of the working class living in the supposed free world, Goldman left her sister, husband, and all her ties for another new beginning in New York City.

Disgusted by authoritative powers and regimes, Goldman spent her early adulthood developing her anarchist beliefs in our neighborhoods. Here she worked as a midwife and nurse, witnessing firsthand the importance of birth control and economic freedom for women. Goldman defined anarchism as “the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.” In 1892, Goldman and her partner,  Alexander Berkman attempted to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick in response to his rough treatment of striking factory workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania. While Frick survived the bullet, Berkman was consequently sentenced to 22 years in prison (and served 14 years). Goldman evaded jail time but gained national infamy. 

Goldman, however, did not get too far before getting in trouble with the law again. In 1893, she organized a protest for workers’ rights in Union Square and drew a crowd of roughly 1,000 people. Soon after, the police hunted her down in Philadelphia and arrested her for inciting a riot. She was sentenced to a year on Blackwell’s Island (now known as Roosevelt Island) for rallying workers to rise up against oppressive powers.

In 1901, Goldman was arrested again and accused of acting as an accomplice to Leon Czolgosz in assassinating President William McKinley. Goldman had only briefly met Czolgosz, and was not involved in the crime and was released on insufficient evidence. She went on to defend Czolgosz. Goldman did not promote violence directly, but she understood it as a response to unjust and cruel systems of governance and control.

From 1903 to 1913, Goldman lived in a sixth-floor apartment in the tenement building at 208 East 13th Street, where she continued to practice anarchism and hone her skills as a gifted orator and writer—gaining both popularity and notoriety. She tackled a variety of progressive topics, dedicating herself to feminism, free speech, free love, birth control, the eight-hour workday, and anti-militarism, among other battles. Throughout the 1910s, she toured nationally, to crowds of up to 75,000 people, where she spoke to people of all walks of life, including immigrants, citizens, progressives, and moderates. Her articles and essays encouraged readers to oppose the governing powers and exploitative capitalist systems. And from 1906 to 1917, Goldman wrote for her own literary magazine, Mother Earth, out of her East Village apartment. 

On February 11, 1916, Goldman was arrested again in Union Square as a result of her outspoken campaign for legalized birth control, believing that contraception was essential to women’s social, sexual, and economic freedom. From then on, her arrests became so frequent and almost expected, Goldman began carrying around a book for fear of sitting in jail with nothing to read. Throughout World War I, Goldman protested the war and the draft, arguing America’s position was rooted in capitalism and imperialism. On December 21, 1919, Goldman, along with 248 foreign-born radicals, was deported to the Soviet Union on the S.S. Buford under the 1918 Alien Act because of her call for Americans to defy enlistments orders for World War I, their anarchist beliefs, and outspoken distaste for the U.S. government. 

Goldman spent the last two decades of her life far away from our neighborhoods and from New York. Banned from the United States, she continued advocating for what she believed in through speeches given across Europe and Canada. She died in 1940, and her body rests in Chicago, next to the Haymarket protesters who sparked her political radicalism. Though she died in exile, Emma Goldman’s radical spirit still lingers in our neighborhoods, where questioning power and reimagining freedom are part of the everyday rhythm.