III. EMPRESS

“Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian.”

-‘Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap’, a lecture (c. 1912), published in Red Emma Speaks, Part 1 (1972) edited by Alix Kates Shulman

IN SHORT:

UPRIGHT: Inspired actions and words. The politics of the personal. Living in accordance with a code. Indicates expansive outcomes when committed to a higher ideal or emancipatory goal. Possible introductions to new communities or struggles. A warm way of life, anti-domination to its core. New matriarchal formations.

REVERSE: Disruption of home life. Lifestyle anarchism. Reclusiveness, stubbornness, and refusal to participate. Questions around sex/fertility/birth control. Outbursts, and grandiosity.

AT LENGTH: Here she sits, Red Emma, Queen of the Anarchists, Mother Earth, Tomorrow’s Child. Both too good and too terrible for this world. She is exalted, inthroned in her posture, utopian decor and soft woolen blankets surrounds her,. Her hands grasp an anarcha-feminist scepter, the perfect wand for our May Day Empress. She sits alone, with the exception of a black cat. However she is never really alone— emotional partnership and intellectual kinship surround her. She is passionate and heartfelt. Somewhere just off-frame Alexander Berkman (Sasha) is preparing lunch, for our Empress and their comrades. .

IN DEPTH: A central figure of Anarchist Philosophy North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century–Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was a political activist and writer. As a youth she was attracted to the anarchism of the Chicago Haymarket affair. She became a well-known writer, publisher and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women’s rights, sexual liberation and other social issues. Under the intellectual premise of ‘propaganda of the deed’, she and fellow anarchist Alexander Berkman (lover and lifelong friend) planned to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick. However the industrialist survived, Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison, and Goldman was in and out of prison for many years that followed. Accused of “inciting to riot” and the distribution of birth control pamphlets. In 1917, this pair were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring against the WWI military draft . And shortly after their release, they were again arrested in 1919 during the First Red Scare, and finally deported to Russia.

While originally supportive of the October Revolution, after the Kronstadt rebellion Emma changed her position; denouncing the violent repression of dissenting voices. She left the Soviet Union, then in 1923 published a book on the subject (My Disillusionment in Russia). She spent the rest of her life between England, France and Canada. At the behest of bohemian socialite and art collector Peggy Guggenheim she wrote an autobiography. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Goldman traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto, Canada, on May 14, 1940, aged 70.

When Emma Goldman was deported from the United States in 1919, J. Edgar Hoover called her “one of the most dangerous women in America.” she retorted that “I consider it an honor to be the first political agitator to be deported from the United States.” Her written work has elucidated radical viewpoints on prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, and sex. In the end, it is Emma herself, the impassioned way in which she lived which looms as a grounding reminder: “If i can’t dance… I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

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