Emma Goldman

Born in Kovno in the Russian Empire in 1869, Emma Goldman immigrated to the United States as a teenager and was drawn into radical politics after the Haymarket affair. She became a powerful lecturer and writer whose anarchist beliefs put her at the center of debates about labor, state power, and individual liberty.

Goldman was known not only for her political radicalism but also for the breadth of causes she defended. She spoke and wrote about free speech, women's equality, sexual freedom, and birth control, and she helped build a wide audience through lectures and through Mother Earth, the magazine she edited.

Her activism brought repeated arrests, and during World War I she was imprisoned for opposing military conscription before being deported from the United States in 1919. The years that followed took her through the Soviet Union and Europe, where she continued to write and speak, remaining an influential and deeply controversial figure until her death in Toronto in 1940.