A brief timeline of the key events in the life of legendary anarchist and women's rights advocate Emma Goldman.
1869 | Emma Goldman born in Kovno, Lithuania. |
1885 | Goldman emigrates to the United States, settling in Rochester, N.Y. |
1886 | Haymarket bombing: At the height of the fight for the eight-hour work day, a bomb is thrown at police at a mass meeting in Haymarket Square, Chicago, to protest the police shooting the previous day of strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works. Though the culprit is never identified, eight anarchist leaders are tried for murder and found guilty. |
1887 | Goldman marries Jacob Kersner, gaining U.S. citizenship; unhappy in the marriage and attracted increasingly to anarchism, Goldman divorces Kersner within the year.
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1889 | Goldman moves to New York City. |
1890 | Goldman's first lecture tour; speaks in Rochester, Buffalo, and Cleveland. |
1892 | Homestead, Pa., steel strike leads to a bloody confrontation between strikers and Pinkerton detectives; Goldman's comrade Alexander Berkman attempts to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, superintendent of the Carnegie Steel Company, and is sentenced to twenty-two years in prison; Goldman suspected of helping to plan the attempt on Frick's life. |
1893 | Goldman prosecuted for a speech at a demonstration of the unemployed in Union Square, New York City; found guilty of aiding and abetting an unlawful assembly; sentenced to one year in prison on Blackwell's Island, where she apprentices as a nurse to the inmates. |
1894 | Strike at the Pullman railroad car plant to protest layoffs and wage cuts spreads to many western railroads after the Pullman strikers appeal for support to American Railway Union leader Eugene Debs; strike is broken by court rulings against the union and by federal troops under orders from President Grover Cleveland. |
1895-1896 | Goldman receives formal training in nursing in Vienna. |
1898 | Spanish-American War: the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam ceded by Spain to the victorious United States. |
1901 | Assassination of President William McKinley by an anarchist. Goldman is unjustly implicated, arrested, held for questioning, and released. Goldman changes her name and, for a brief period, goes underground to avoid public harassment. |
1903 | Goldman helps found the Free Speech League in New York City in response to the first prosecution under a federal anti-anarchist law that barred anarchists from entering the country. |
1905 | Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) founded. |
1906 | Mother Earth magazine is founded by Emma Goldman and comrades; published until 1917. |
1906 | Goldman begins annual lecture tours to raise money for the magazine, speaking on a broad range of issues including modern European drama, women's equality and independence, sexuality and free love, child development and education, and religious fundamentalism.
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1908 | Goldman denied the use of auditoriums in Chicago for meetings; meets Ben Reitman, who offers her his "Hobo Hall," and eventually becomes her lover and the manager of her lecture tours.
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1909 | IWW free speech fight in Spokane, Washington. |
1909-1910 | "Uprising of the Twenty Thousand," a general strike by women garment workers in New York City. |
1910 | Goldman's Anarchism and Other Essays published. |
1911 | Fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City kills 146 people, mostly young women, when exits that were kept locked to prevent union organizers from entering the premises prevented workers from escaping the fire, forcing many of them to jump to their deaths. |
1912 | Free speech fight in San Diego; Ben Reitman dragged from the city by vigilantes and brutalized.
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1913 | IWW strike of Paterson, N.J., silk mills.
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1914 | Goldman's Social Significance of the Modern Drama published.
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1915-1916 | Goldman lectures frequently on birth control and is arrested several times; spends fifteen days in jail on one occasion for distributing birth control information. |
1917 | The United States declares war on Germany, entering World War I.
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1918 | Sedition Act passed. |
1918-1919 | Goldman serves time at state penitentiary in Jefferson City, Mo., Berkman in Atlanta federal penitentiary. |
1919 | Goldman and Berkman deported from the United States with 247 other alien radicals. (Goldman's husband had been denaturalized by the government in 1908 in order to deprive her of her citizenship. The 1918 Alien Act provided that an alien could be deported, if found to be an anarchist, at any time after entering the United States.) |
1919-1920 | "Red Scare": In the United States, the intolerance and suspicion of foreigners and radicals increases in the postwar years as the Bolsheviks consolidate their victory in Russia, producing fear of worldwide revolution; climaxes in the 1920 Palmer raids, when thousands of foreign-born radicals are rounded up, and many deported. |
1920 | Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution (giving women the right to vote) ratified.
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1920-1921 | Goldman and Berkman in exile in Soviet Russia, where they confront the Bolsheviks' denial of free speech and expression and especially the suppression of anarchists. |
1921 | December: Goldman and Berkman leave Russia |
1922-1924 | Exile in Berlin, after a brief stay in Stockholm, Sweden. |
1923 | Goldman publishes My Disillusionment in Russia. |
1924-1926 | Goldman lives in London, writing and lecturing on conditions in Soviet Russia and on modern drama. |
1926-1928 | Goldman lives in Canada. Based in Toronto, she writes and lectures on Russia, modern drama, and social issues. |
1927 | Execution of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti provokes international outcry. |
1928-1936 | Goldman finds a base for her writing and a respite from her lecture tours in a cottage in Saint-Tropez, France, purchased for her by philanthropist Peggy Guggenheim. |
1931 | Goldman publishes her autobiography, Living My Life. |
1932 | Goldman lectures in Scandinavia and Germany on the menace of fascism and the rise of Nazism. |
1933 | Goldman expelled from Holland. |
1934 | Goldman granted a visa to enter the United States for a ninety-day lecture tour. |
1936 | Ill with cancer, Berkman commits suicide. |
1936-1938 | Goldman visits Spain and enlists in the loyalist cause in the Spanish civil war, later opening an office in London to raise support for the Spanish anarchists fighting on the loyalist side. |
1939 | Goldman moves to Canada after the defeat of the Spanish loyalists to raise funds for women and children refugees from the Civil War. |
1940 | Goldman dies in Toronto and is buried in Chicago near the Haymarket martyrs who first inspired her in 1887. |
Taken from the Emma Goldman Papers web resource at Berkeley University (no longer online.
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