Emma goldman simone de beauvoir biography

by Adele  A Wilby

Biographies frequently provide us with insights into individual characters in a way that autobiographies might not: the third person narrator offers the prospect of greater ‘objectivity’ when evaluating and narrating information and events and circumstances.  And so it is with Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich’s Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman,and Katie Kirkpatrick’s Becoming Beauvoir: A Life.These two books provide a wealth of knowledge on the political and philosophical thinking that engaged the brilliant minds of two significant women of the twentieth century: Emma Goldman and Simone Beauvoir.

The life trajectories of the two women could not have been more different: Goldman was a Jewish Russian émigré to the United States; she learned her politics through experience and in that process clarified her political thinking on anarchism, and her life was lived humbly. Beauvoir on the other hand, was from a bourgeois Catholic family and benefited from a formal education and she lived life relatively comfortably. However, despite their divergent lifestyles and politics, similarities can be drawn between their thinking on women, love and freedom.

There is literature available on these issues, but Goldman and Beauvoir were prepared to live the principles they espoused in the early twentieth century. For both women, freedom was central to their thinking and shaped the way they lived their lives. Consequently, their personal relationships were unconventional:  they had many lovers and loves, including, in the case of Beauvoir, female lovers. Nevertheless, they were able to sustain a relationship with one man in particular throughout their lifetimes:  Alexander Berkman in the case of Emma Goldman, and Jean Paul Sartre in the case of Simone de Beauvoir. Commenting on her first encounter with Berkman, Goldman says, ‘a deep love for him welled up in my heart… a feeling of certainty

Emma Goldman was a well-known anarchist, rebel, feminist, and an ardent proponent of free speech and birth control. She played an important part in the distribution and dialogue of anarchist political philosophy in Europe and North America in the 20th century.

Goldman’s Early Life

Emma was born in a Jewish family in Russia on June 27, 1869. She lived in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas with her father, Abraham Goldman, and mother, Taube Bienowitch. She experienced a troublesome youth as she grew up in a family that she described as not providing her with enough love.

Her father lost all that they had in a business, leaving very little for the family to live with. To avoid getting married early, Emma immigrated to the U.S. in 1885 with her sister, Helena. Within a few years, her parents also moved to the U.S. due to extreme anti-Semitism that they wanted to escape.

Goldman’s Plans to Assassinate

Goldman got married in 1887 and then moved to New York two years later. She became an activist in the anarchist movement soon after and later became one of the more well-known and outspoken American radicals, writing and lecturing on anarchism, political topics, and women’s rights.

Emma, along with her friend and lover, Alexander Berkman, who was also an anarchist, planned to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, who was an industrialist and financier, as an act of propaganda of the deed. This meant that violence was considered acceptable, but only as a means for inciting the crowds to revolt.

They both did this because they thought by killing a representative of a cruel system, the consciousness of the people would become aroused and they would revolt. But the assassination never hap

Emma Goldman (27 June1869 – 14 May1940) was an American anarchist political activist and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.

Quotes

• The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief... So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies.

• Ladies and gentlemen, I came here to avoid as much as possible treading on your corns. I had intended to deal only with the basic issue of economics that dictates our lives from the cradle to the grave, regardless of our religion or moral beliefs. I see now that it was a mistake. If one enters a battle, he cannot be squeamish about a few corns. Here, then, are my answers: I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years past been working to undo the botched job your God has made.
  As to killing rulers, it depends entirely on the position of the ruler. If it is the Russian Czar, I most certainly believe in dispatching him to where he belongs. If the ruler is as ineffectual as an American President, it is hardly worth the effort. There are, however, some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and Bigotry — the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth. As for the gentleman who asked if free love would not build more houses of prostitution, my answer is: They will all be empty if the men of the future look like him.
  • Responding to audience questions during a speech in Detroit (1898); as recounted in Living My Life (1931), p. 207; quoted by Annie Laurie Gaylor in Women Without Superstition, p. 382

• Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been la