ABSTRACT
Years later, Margaret Anderson, editor of the avant-garde Little Review, recalled the demonic legend of the anarchist Emma Goldman, whose presence in town had once caused riots. “Her name was enough in those days to produce a shudder,” wrote Anderson in her memoirs. “She was considered a monster, an exponent of free love and bombs.” Yet if police often rushed to arrest her, thousands of people flocked to her lectures on subjects ranging from trade unionism, anarcho-syndicalism, antimilitarism, and atheism to birth control, women's emancipation, sexual freedom, and homosexual rights. Equally at home leading labor demonstrations in the streets or lecturing to intellectuals on Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Goldman combined charisma with courage in a life-long struggle against injustice. Almost from the moment she entered the anarchist movement in New York City in 1889 until her deportation to Soviet Russia in December of 1919, she remained one of the most controversial women in American public life. Her monumental autobiography Living My Life , published to acclaim in 1931, remains a compelling account of a radical life outside the conventions of marriage and motherhood, written by a woman “woven of many skeins, conflicting in shade and texture.”
