The Most Dangerous Woman In the World

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

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Emma Goldman was born in 1869 in Kovno, then part of imperial Russia.

The formative moment in her political awakening came during the so-called Haymarket affair, when four Chicago labor leaders, all self-described anarchists, were framed and executed for a crime they apparently never committed. The event shook Goldman to the core,

in 1892 she conspired to assassinate the industrialist Henry Frick, a fierce adversary of organized labor ‏(the plot was not successful‏), and it was with Berkman that she was deported from the United States to Russia in 1919 for inciting against the draft.

In her 30 years in the United States, when she was not on the road firing up the crowds, inspiring presidential assassins ‏(Leon Czolgosz, the man who shot and killed William McKinley in 1901, said he was motivated by a speech she had given‏) or doing time in prison, Goldman worked as a midwife and nurse. In 1906, she fulfilled a longtime professional dream, when she founded the anarchist monthly magazine Mother Earth − a publication that became the major focus of her life until it was shut down by the government in 1917.

After leaving Russia, in December 1921, following a brutal crackdown by the Red Army, in which thousands of Russians were killed, Goldman spent most of the remaining years of her life in exile in England and France. Although she was certainly cognizant of the rise of Nazism and the persecution of Jews in Germany, it is not clear from this biography how she was able, or whether she even tried, to reconcile the events of the era with her fierce anti-war views and her conviction that anti-Semitism would go away if only the Jews would make themselves citizens of the world, as she had.


Goldman, who died in 1940, was rediscovered and embraced as the darling of the New Left in the 1960s. As the anti-establishment movement in America enjoys yet another resurgence these days, the author, Vivian Gornick couldn’t have chosen a better time to publish a biography of this true trailblazer.

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