Emma Goldman was a Russian-born 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.
Anarchist feminism is a system of analysis which combines the principles and power analysis of anarchist theory with feminism. It closely resembles intersectional feminism. Anarcha-feminism generally posits that patriarchy and traditional gender roles as manifestations of involuntary coercive hierarchy should be replaced by decentralized free association. Anarcha-feminists believe that the struggle against patriarchy is an essential part of class conflict and the anarchist struggle against the state and capitalism. In essence, the philosophy sees anarchist struggle as a necessary component of feminist struggle and vice versa. L. Susan Brown claims that "as anarchism is a political philosophy that opposes all relationships of power, it is inherently feminist".
Itō Noe was a Japanese anarchist, social critic, author, and feminist. She was the editor-in-chief of the feminist magazine Seitō (Bluestocking). Her progressive anarcha-feminist ideology challenged the norms of the Meiji and Taishō periods in which she lived. She drew praise from critics by being able to weave her personal and political ideas into her writings. The Japanese government, however, condemned her for challenging the constructs of the time. She became a martyr of the anarchist ideology in which she believed during the Amakasu Incident, when she was murdered along with her lover, anarchist author Ōsugi Sakae, and his nephew.
Voltairine de Cleyre was an American anarchist known for being a prolific writer and speaker who opposed capitalism, marriage, and the state, as well as the domination of religion over sexuality and over women's lives, all of which she saw as all interconnected. She is often characterized as a major early feminist because of her views.
Ben Lewis Reitman M.D. (1879–1943) was an American anarchist and physician to the poor. He is best remembered today as one of radical Emma Goldman's lovers. Martin Scorsese's 1972 feature film Boxcar Bertha is based on one of Reitman's books.
Hippolyte Havel (1871–1950) was an American anarchist who was known as an activist in the United States and part of the radical circle around Emma Goldman in the early 20th century. He had been imprisoned as a young man in Austria-Hungary because of his political activities, but made his way to London. Then in the British metropolis he met anarchist Emma Goldman on a lecture tour from the United States. She befriended him and he immigrated to the United States.
The connection between left-leaning ideologies and LGBT rights struggles has a long and mixed history. The status of LGBT people in socialist states have varied throughout history.
In the United States, anarchism began in the mid-19th century and started to grow in influence as it entered the American labor movements, growing an anarcho-communist current as well as gaining notoriety for violent propaganda of the deed and campaigning for diverse social reforms in the early 20th century. By around the start of the 20th century, the heyday of individualist anarchism had passed and anarcho-communism and other social anarchist currents emerged as the dominant anarchist tendency.
Kate Cooper Austin was an American journalist and advocate of feminist and anarchist causes.
The Politics of Individualism: Liberalism, Liberal Feminism, and Anarchism is a 1993 political science book by L. Susan Brown. She begins by noting that liberalism and anarchism seem at times to share common components, but on other occasions are in direct opposition to one another. She argues that what they have in common is "existential individualism", the belief in freedom for freedom's sake. However, she notes that in liberal works there exists also an "instrumental individualism", by which she means freedom to satisfy individual interests. Brown argues that the latter annihilates the intentions of the former because it allows individuals the "freedom" to disrupt the freedom of other individuals in its aim of achieving individual goals. On the other hand, instrumental individualism requires some degree of existential individualism to sustain itself.
Living My Life is the autobiography of Lithuanian-born anarchist Emma Goldman, who became internationally renowned as an activist based in the United States. It was published in two volumes in 1931 and 1934. Goldman wrote it while living in Saint-Tropez, France, following her disillusionment with the Bolshevik role in the Russian revolution.
William Buwalda (1869–1946) was a United States soldier who gained national attention after being punished with three years' hard labour for shaking hands with anarchist Emma Goldman in the early 1900s after attending a speech by her.
The relation between anarchism and Friedrich Nietzsche has been ambiguous. Even though Nietzsche criticized anarchists, his thought proved influential for many of them. As such "[t]here were many things that drew anarchists to Nietzsche: his hatred of the state; his disgust for the mindless social behavior of 'herds'; his anti-Christianity; his distrust of the effect of both the market and the State on cultural production; his desire for an 'übermensch'—that is, for a new human who was to be neither master nor slave".
Major anarchist thinkers, past and present, have generally supported women's equality. Free love advocates sometimes traced their roots back to Josiah Warren and to experimental communities, viewing sexual freedom as an expression of an individual's self-ownership. Free love particularly stressed women's rights. In New York's Greenwich Village, "bohemian" feminists and socialists advocated self-realisation and pleasure for both men and women. In Europe and North America, the free love movement combined ideas revived from utopian socialism with anarchism and feminism to attack the "hypocritical" sexual morality of the Victorian era.
Rebecca Edelsohn, in contemporary sources often given as Becky Edelson, (1892–1973) was a Latvian-American anarchist and hunger striker who was jailed in 1914 for disorderly conduct during an Industrial Workers of the World speech. According to The New York Times, she was the first woman to attempt a hunger strike in the United States.
Maria Roda (1877–1958) was an Italian American anarchist-feminist activist, speaker and writer, who participated in the labor struggles among textile workers in Italy and the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
"The Traffic in Women" is an essay written by anarchist writer Emma Goldman in 1910. It has been published in various ways, including within Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), published by Mother Earth, and as the named, leading essay of a collection of Emma Goldman essays: The Traffic in Women, and Other Essays on Feminism. Mother Earth was a monthly anarchist magazine founded by Goldman, Max Baginski, and others in 1906. The essay is one of more than 20 articles that Goldman wrote during 1906 to 1940.
Almeda Sperry (1879–1957) was an American anarchist, political activist, and former prostitute. She is known for the passionate love letters she wrote to fellow anarchist Emma Goldman. The letters allude to past sexual encounters between the two women, although the extent to which Goldman may have reciprocated the romantic feelings expressed by Sperry is unknown.
Cassius V. Cook was an American anarchist activist, writer and publisher.
Lillian Susan Harman-O'Brien was an American sex radical feminist and editor. Her father Moses Harman edited Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, a regional, weekly paper that introduced her to issues of women's sexual freedom. She became a national icon for that cause following her "free marriage", which took place outside state and church recognition, and her subsequent imprisonment. Upon her release, Harman edited multiple publications, including an anarchist periodical with her husband. Her work culminated with her being named president of a British organization that campaigned to legitimize non-marital sex. Her first child was born under a contract that stipulated the father's responsibilities in supporting the daughter. She moved from Kansas to Chicago, remarried, and had a son. Little is known about her life following the death of her father in 1910.
