Emma Goldman

Born in Kovno in the Russian Empire (now Kaunas, Lithuania) in 1869, she immigrated to the United States as a teenager and worked in factories before becoming deeply involved in anarchist politics. She grew into a powerful public speaker and writer whose lectures and essays challenged authority, capitalism, militarism, and social conventions.

She became widely known in the United States for her defense of free speech, labor activism, and outspoken views on women's equality, sexuality, and birth control. Her anti-conscription activism during World War I led to imprisonment, and in 1919 she was deported from the United States.

After deportation, she spent time in Soviet Russia, where she became sharply critical of Bolshevik repression, and later lived and worked in Europe and Canada. Across her life she remained committed to individual liberty and social justice, and her memoirs, essays, and speeches helped make her one of the best-known radical thinkers of the early twentieth century.