Timeline of Emma Goldman’s Life

Goldman’s storied life is well-documented. This timeline is adapted and drawn from the work of the Emma Goldman Papers Project archivists, who created a highly detailed, comprehensive timeline: https://libcom.org/history/emma-goldman-extended-timeline

This brief version is intended to give a taste of her interactions with historical events, lecture tours, travels, and intellectual production.

1869 June 27 Emma Goldman was born in Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania, which was then a province of the Russian Empire. Her youth was spent in Kovno, Popelan, Königsberg, and St. Petersburg. “The dates on her tombstone in Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago are wrong.”

1870 November 21 Alexander (Sasha) Berkman born in Vilne, Russia (now Vilnius, Lithuania).

1881 March 1 Czar Alexander II assassinated in St. Petersburg, Russia.

1885 December Goldman immigrates to Rochester, N.Y.

1886 The Haymarket Affair unfolds: on May 1, three hundred thousand workers across the US strike for an 8-hour workday. On May 4, in Haymarket Square in Chicago, a bomb is thrown after a protest against police violence. Seven officers were killed. Masses of German immigrants in Chicago are rounded up. Several anarchists were held responsible for the bomb, though the actual bomb-thrower was never identified. Four anarchists (three of whom were immigrants) were executed in November 1887, their deaths galvanizing the labor movement. Goldman was radicalized by the Haymarket trial and execution.

1887 February Goldman marries fellow factory worker Jacob A. Kersner and gains U.S. citizenship.

1888 Goldman divorces Kersner and leaves Rochester.

1889 Goldman arrives in New York City and meets the German orator Johann Most, editor of Die Freiheit. Goldman works at Die Freiheit’s office. Goldman and Alexander (Sasha) Berkman become lovers.

1890 January Goldman goes on her first lecture tour, organized by Johann Most, speaking in Yiddish and German. She finds her voice as an orator and thinker. Topics of her lectures include “Paris Commune, 1871” and “The Right To Be Lazy.”

1892 Goldman moves to Massachusetts and opens small businesses, including an ice-cream parlor. Later that year, she returns to New York City.

July-August At the Carnegie Steel Company in Homestead, PA, nine striking steel workers are killed by Pinkertons, hired by Henry Clay Frick. Goldman and Berkman decide to avenge their deaths.

July 23 Berkman tries and fails to assassinate Frick. Police raid Goldman’s apartment and seize her papers. Debates rage within the labor movement about violence and strategy.

September 19 Berkman found guilty and sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Goldman falls in love with Austrian anarchist Edward Brady.

1893

August The day after a riot of the unemployed on Aug. 17, Goldman addresses a public meeting, urging those in need to take bread if they are hungry. The next evening, she helps lead a procession of several 3

hundred anarchists to Union Square, where, among many other speakers, she addresses a crowd of the unemployed. On Aug. 21, Goldman again leads a march of a thousand people to Union Square, where, speaking in German and English, she repeats her belief that workers have a right to take bread if they are hungry, and to demonstrate their needs “before the palaces of the rich” about three thousand gather to listen. Goldman’s speech is characterized by the press as “incendiary” and, over a week later, cited as the reason for her arrest.

In Philadelphia, Goldman meets the anarchists Max Baginksi and Voltairine de Cleyre. Catholic-born De Cleyre later becomes a contributor to Goldman’s paper Mother Earth. Goldman called her “the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.”

October 16 Goldman sentenced to Blackwell’s Island penitentiary for one year. She is released after 10 months.

December 16 Benefit concert and ball held in New York City for Goldman and others. Voltairine de Cleyre delivers a speech, “In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation.”

1895 Fall Goldman lectures in the UK on topics including “The Futility of Politics and Its Corrupting Influence.” In England, she meets Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and the French Communard Louise Michel, whom she finds ecstatically inspiring. Goldman travels to Vienna to study nursing and midwifery. Attends lectures there by Sigmund Freud.

1899

Mid-October Goldman returns to New York City, raises money to help dig Berkman’s prison escape tunnel.

Winter Goldman travels to London, lectures in English and German. Meets the Russian populist Nicholas Chaikovsky and the Czechoslovakian refugee Hippolyte Havel, with whom she later falls in love.

1900 Travels throughout Europe. Attends the Neo-Malthusian Congress in Paris, which holds its meetings in secret because of a French law prohibiting organized attempts to limit offspring. Goldman obtains birth control literature and contraceptives to take back to the United States.

1901 Works as a nurse in NYC. Arranges a US tour for Kropotkin. September President William McKinley shot by self-proclaimed anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Police claim Czolgosz was inspired by Goldman’s lectures. She goes into hiding and is eventually arrested.

1902 Criminal Anarchy Act passed in New York State. Goldman works as a night-shift nurse for immigrants on the Lower East Side.

1904 Supreme Court rules on the John Turner case (Turner v. Williams, 194 U.S. 279) that Congress has unlimited power to deport anarchists.

1905 February The Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon moves to St. Louis and becomes friends with Goldman. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) are established in Chicago.

1906

March First issue of Mother Earth published; first run numbers three thousand.

May 18 Alexander Berkman released from prison.

1907

Late February, Early March Russian exile Grigory Gershuni, recently escaped from Siberia, visits Goldman to encourage her work on behalf of Russian freedom.

July-AugustGoldman’s essay, “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation” translated and published by German and Japanese anarchists. Goldman selected as American delegate to the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam.

August 25-30International Anarchist Congress takes place in Amsterdam, attended by three hundred delegates, which was held simultaneously with the Zionist Congress in Amsterdam.

1908 March 7-12 Goldman repeatedly barred from speaking at public lecture halls in Chicago. She meets Ben Reitman, a physician of gynecology and venereal disease, who invites her to lecture at the famous “Hobo College.” Reitman becomes her lover and talent manager.

1909

January Goldman lectures across California on drama, violence, and psychology.

May Goldman’s famous essay “A Woman Without a Country,” responding to the threat of deportation, published in Mother Earth.

October Protests the Spanish execution of Francisco Ferrer, founder of the Modern School movement.

December 12 Goldman speaks on “Will the Vote Free Woman: Woman Suffrage” to an audience of three hundred women, many of whom are suffragists.

1910

January-June Goldman delivers a total of 120 lectures before forty thousand people in thirty-seven cities in twenty-five states; credits her success to the organizing skills of Ben Reitman.

March 26 Amendment to the Immigration Act of 1907 is passed, forbidding entrance to the United States of criminals, paupers, anarchists, and persons carrying diseases.

December Anarchism and Other Essays published.

1911

January 24 Execution of twelve anarchists in Japan.

March 25 Fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City kills 146 people, mostly young women. This tragedy galvanizes the labor movement to fight for protections.

1912

March Aroused by the experience of hearing her lecture, the organizer and sex worker Almeda Sperry begins a passionate correspondence with Goldman.

August 1 Goldman attends lecture by W. E. B. Du Bois.

October 6-December 22 Goldman holds a Yiddish and English Sunday lecture series in New York City; topics include “The Psychology of Anarchism,” “The Dupes of Politics,” “Sex Sterilization of Criminals,” “The Resurrection of Alexander Berkman: Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist,” “The Failure of Democracy,” “Economic Efficiency--the Modern Menace,” and Damaged Goods by Eugène Brieux (A Powerful Drama, Dealing with the Curse of Venereal Disease).

1913

January-February Goldman lectures on drama and literature, especially works by Tolstoy, Strindberg, Shaw, Gorki, and Chekhov.

June Arahata Kanson translates Goldman’s essay “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation” into Japanese.

1914 Joe Hill arrested in Utah; charged with murder despite lack of evidence.

April The Social Significance of the Modern Drama published.

April 6-12 Goldman becomes close with Margaret Anderson, editor of the literary magazine Little Review. Anderson writes rapturously about Goldman and helps organize her lectures in elite and working-class venues in Chicago.

Late August Margaret Sanger indicted for obscenity in connection with her journal The Woman Rebel. A few months later, Sanger flees the country until Oct. 1915.

1917 Goldman and Berkman attend Leon Trotsky’s farewell lecture in New York City.

June 15 Goldman and Berkman arrested by U.S. Marshal Thomas McCarthy; later indicted on charge of conspiracy to violate the Draft Act. President Wilson signs the Espionage Act, which sets penalties of up to twenty years imprisonment and fines of up to $10,000 for persons aiding the enemy, interfering with the draft, or encouraging disloyalty of military members; also declares nonmailable all written material advocating treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to the law.

June 16 Goldman and Berkman plead not guilty on conspiracy charges. Summer Goldman and Berkman are found guilty of conspiracy. Appeal goes to Supreme Court.

October Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

1918

February 6 Goldman begins serving her prison sentence in Jefferson City, Mo.

March 18 Reitman begins six-month prison sentence for conviction for distributing birth control information.

April The Cheka (the Soviet secret police) raids anarchist centers in Moscow. Approximately forty anarchists are killed or wounded; more than five hundred taken prisoners.

May 16 The Sedition Act is passed.

October 16 Anti-Anarchist Act passed by Congress.

1919

May German Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer killed.

December 21 Goldman, Berkman, and 247 Russian radicals deported on the so-called “Red Ark,” the S.S. Buford.

1920

February Goldman and Berkman settle in Petrograd.

March Goldman and Berkman travel to Moscow, meet with Lenin, express concern about lack of free press and suppression of dissent.

May 5 Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are arrested in Massachusetts. They serve seven years in prison before their execution. The trial is widely criticized and becomes a global literary and political cause célèbre.

September In Odessa, Goldman meets with local officials and again polls members of the Jewish community about their experience with and views about anti-Semitism. Meets the famous Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik.

November Trotsky orders attack on Makhno’s headquarters; Makhno manages to escape to Paris. Trotsky orders imprisonment of the anarchist Volin.

1921 March Kronstadt uprising in Finland. Sailors demand democratic election of Soviet representatives. Trotsky orders bombardment. With their last tie to the Bolsheviks broken, Goldman and Berkman leave Russia and alert the world to what they have witnessed.

1922 Spring Befriends the theorist Rudolf Rocker and his partner, Milly Witkop. Rocker edits the London Yiddish paper Arbeter fraynd. Goldman begins writing manuscript titled My Two Years in Russia.

1923

January-February Visits Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute for Sex Psychology in Berlin. Corresponds with Hirschfeld about transgender studies and gay rights.

November First part of Goldman’s manuscript is published as My Disillusionment in Russia.

1924

April 24 Goldman howled down during a meeting of five thousand workers in Berlin when she criticizes the Soviet government. Goldman warned about the consequences of expressing further criticism of the Soviet Republic.

October Meets with British author Rebecca West.

November Twelve chapters omitted from Goldman’s book on Russia are published separately as My Further Disillusionment in Russia.

1925

June 27 On her birthday, Goldman marries James Colton, an elderly anarchist friend from Wales, to obtain British citizenship and the right to travel more widely.

1927 Lectures across Canada on Russian drama and literature to large audiences. Works on composing her memoirs.

1928 Moves to France, reunites with old comrades like the Rockers and Berkmans, works on her memoirs.

1929 Attains book contract with Knopf, with an advance of $7,000.

1931 Goldman publishes her autobiography, Living My Life, to great reviews—including on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. The Forward, a Yiddish socialist daily in New York, translations and serializes it. Goldman is dissatisfied with both the translation and editor/novelist Abe Cahan’s introduction.

1933

January 30 Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany.

March Reichstag Fire in Berlin. Nazis consolidate power. Goldman tries to organize a mass protest in London against the Nazi takeover, but alienates many on the British Left with her criticism of Bolshevism. Rudolf and Milly Rocker arrive in London, exiled from Nazi Germany.

March 1 “An Anarchist Looks at Life” is Goldman’s subject at Foyle’s literary luncheon attended by six hundred; Paul Robeson sings and proposes a vote of thanks, seconded by Rebecca West.

November In Paris, at her Yiddish lecture, she learns from German refugees about the growing horrors in Nazi Germany.

1934

June Erich Mühsam, German anarchist poet and friend of Landauer, dies in Nazi concentration camp.

July First general strike in U.S. occurs in San Francisco. Supports 12,000 striking longshoremen.

1935 Lectures successfully on sexuality and birth control across Canada, especially in Yiddish. Later that year, she lectures on drama and hosts the 70th birthday celebration for Chaim Zhitlovsky, the exiled Russian revolutionary and Yiddish author.

1936

March Goldman’s friendship with Eslanda and Paul Robeson deepens.

June Berkman shoots himself, an act of euthanasia.

July 19 Spanish Civil War begins.

Autumn Goldman moves to Barcelona, the anarchist stronghold in Catalonia, to support the CNT-FAI. Travels to collectivized farms and factories and the Aragon front. Meets with Buenaventura Durruti, a leading FAI activist and militia commander. Addresses a mass meeting of sixteen thousand people organized by the FAI youth.

1937 May Goldman speaks to sixty thousand people in a May Day demonstration in London, on behalf of the CNT-FAI.

1938

January Goldman acknowledges that Paul Robeson and his wife are distancing themselves from her as a result of their close association with the Communists. U.S. labor leader Rose Pesotta meets with Goldman in London; promises to help organize a committee to obtain a U.S. visa for Goldman.

May Goldman writes “Trotsky Protests Too Much,” a reply to articles on the Kronstadt rebellion.

Autumn In Spain, continues to work against fascist forces. Witnesses the bombardment of Barcelona from the air and the chronic shortage of food and electricity.

December Goldman travels to Amsterdam to organize Berkman’s and her papers at the International Institute of Social History (IISH).

1939

January 26 Barcelona falls to Franco’s forces.

March Goldman travels to Paris and London to support demoralized refugee Spanish anarchists. By the end of the year, she returns to Canada and continues lecturing to huge crowds and supporting Spanish comrades from there.

1940

Winter Goldman raises funds for Spanish anarchists and Attilio Bortolotti, “the grand old man of Toronto anarchism.”

February 17 Goldman is paralyzed on the right side by a stroke and becomes unable to speak.

May 14 Goldman dies at the age of seventy. Hailed by condolences from comrades around the world.

May 17 Goldman is buried in Waldheim (Forest Home) Cemetery in Chicago, near the Haymarket memorial, Lucy Parsons, and Voltairine de Cleyre. Her coffin is draped with the Spanish anti-fascist flag.