Years before her critics dubbed her
one of the most dangerous people in America,
a young woman named Emma Goldman
found herself at a dance.
Although she was a political activist
attending the event to gain support for her cause,
she also just loved dancing --
so much so that one of her allies took her aside
to criticize her for being frivolous and undignified.
After all, should a serious activist
be seen having so much fun?
Furious at the interruption,
Goldman told the young man
to mind his own business,
because the liberty she fought for
was not about the "denial of life and joy."
Instead, she said,
"I want freedom,
the right to self-expression,
everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things."
For Goldman, a revolution without dancing
was not a revolution worth having.
She was born in 1869 to Jewish parents
in the Russian Empire and raised by a
distant mother and an abusive father
who tried to force her to marry at age 15.
When she refused, he threw her French
grammar book in the fire, saying,
"Girls do not have to learn much!
All a Jewish daughter needs to know
is how to prepare gefullte fish,
cut noodles fine, and give the man
plenty of children."
There are few women in her era who would defy
that idea of womanhood quite as much
as Emma Goldman.
When she was 16, she escaped her father
by emigrating to the United States,
where she discovered her true calling:
a political rebel and a fiery orator who would spend
her entire life calling for revolution.
She was horrified by the tragic story
of several labor activists who were executed
in Chicago, and found herself drawn to the labor
movement and eventually to anarchism.
Contrary to what that word might suggest,
Goldman's philosophy was not about
disorder and chaos.
It was about personal freedom
and rejecting institutions she believed
were repressive:
government, religion, war,
business interests,
and even marriage.
Although she did end up marrying several times
out of convenience or for citizenship,
Goldman rejected traditional notions of marriage
and chose never to have children.
Goldman quickly became one of the most
famous radical figures in America,
whose power with words was sometimes
referred to as a "sledgehammer."
She traveled across the country
speaking so passionately that the famed reporter,
Nellie Bly,
would dub her a "little Joan of Arc."
Over the years, Goldman was sent to prison
for her ideas several times,
once for promoting birth control,
once for discouraging men from registering
for the draft, and once for
telling unemployed workers to "take bread"
from the wealthy if they were deprived
of work and food.
Despite her support for female independence,
she often found herself at odds with suffragists,
believing it less important to get women the vote
in systems she viewed as oppressive
than to dismantle them entirely.
Emma said, "the right to vote, or equal civil rights,
may be good demands, but true emancipation
begins neither at the polls nor in courts."
She said, "it begins in woman's soul."
She believed that women needed to reject
the sexist rules of societies and governments
and assert their right to make decisions
about their lives and their bodies.
Only that, said Goldman, would truly
set women free.
Although she was heterosexual,
Goldman was one of the earliest
American advocates for gay rights,
as well as birth control
and the sexual freedom of women.
"I demand the independence of woman;
her right to support herself;
to live for herself;
to love whomever she pleases,
or as many as she pleases," she wrote.
"I demand freedom for both sexes,
freedom of action, freedom in love,
and freedom in motherhood."
Many of her ideas about gender, sex, and sexuality
would be considered controversial even today--
and in the late 1800s,
they were positively shocking.
Goldman was a thorn in the side of
American authorities for many years.
In 1919, they finally declared
her American citizenship invalid,
and deported her back to Russia,
which had recently had
a people's revolution of its own.
But what she found in the aftermath
was not the utopia of her dreams,
but rather another repressive regime
willing to crush the rights of its own citizens.
After meeting with Lenin himself,
she became deeply disillusioned
with the new, communist government.
So she traveled abroad speaking out about
the oppressiveness of the Soviets,
which alienated many of her allies
and got her ejected from both
Sweden and Germany.
When she finally returned to America in 1934
(with the permission
of the Roosevelt administration)
Goldman was a grandmotherly figure in her 60s,
but just as stubborn and outspoken
as she'd ever been.
On her final U.S. speaking tour,
her speeches rallied against
the fascism of Hitler's Germany
and the communism of Stalin's Russia,
angering people on the right and the left.
Even old age could not dampen
her revolutionary spirit;
at 67, she traveled to Barcelona
to support workers and anarchists
who had risen up against fascism
during the Spanish Civil War.
She called them a "shining example"
to the rest of the world,
and told an audience of 10,000 that
"your ideal has been my ideal for 45 years,
and it will remain to my last breath."
At the end of her life,
when the goals of her cause seemed more
unpopular and further away
from reality than ever,
Goldman never wavered in her beliefs,
even when the price was deportation,
threats of violence, and prison terms.
She hoped that her example could light the way
for future generations as well.
As she wrote to a friend and former lover
years before her death,
"someday, sometime long after we're gone,
liberty may again raise its proud head.
It is up to us to blaze its way --
dim as our torch may seem today --
it is still the one flame."
Throughout her life, Goldman had a knack
for infuriating both friends and foes,
but would never compromise her convictions
or the way she lived to please either of them.
"A trail of bonfires marked Goldman's
rampage through life,"
wrote one historian, and indeed,
Goldman was willing to burn almost any bridge
in the name of her truth.
As she once said
(when a young man tried to stop her from dancing)
she would never stop fighting for a world
where liberty was the birthright
of every human being,
and where women could
live, love, and dance
as freely as they wanted.