Emma Goldman (1869-1940) stands as a major figure in the history of American radicalism and feminism. A well-known and influential anarchist of her day, Goldman was an early advocate of free speech, birth control, women’s equality and independence, and workers’ rights. Her public stance against military conscription led to an eighteen-month imprisonment before the First World War, followed by her deportation from the U.S. in 1919. For the rest of her life she continued to participate in the social and political movements of her time, from the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War.
As an orator Emma Goldman was fiery and brilliant, drawing crowds of thousands to hear her speak. She is known for her extraordinary energy and appetite for life. Many of us associate her with the quote: “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.”
Recently, the Persimmon Tree editors approached Candace Falk, editor and director of the Emma Goldman Papers Project at U.C. Berkeley (http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/Goldman), and asked her whether there was material in the voluminous archives that revealed Emma Goldman’s thoughts and feelings about aging. Candace Falk turned the project over to three long-time volunteers, June Brumer, Rae Lisker, and Beth Wilson. These women—in their 70s and 80s, and lifetime activists for peace and justice—spent many hours searching for resonant excerpts from Goldman’s correspondence and writings.
For the volunteers, working with the Emma Goldman Papers for over twenty years has been “an opportunity to engage with young people and see the world through different eyes… It has helped us age more gracefully by expanding our intellectual horizons. Although we are chronologically older than Emma Goldman was at the time of these quotes, in life experience we are at the same point. We see a reflection of much of what we feel, and we are heartened by Goldman’s efforts toward the end of her life on behalf of the anarchists of the Spanish Civil War. Her involvement renewed her sense of purpose and satisfaction.”
The quotes below are from the last eleven years of Emma Goldman’s life:
“One should put in all one can . . . I am trying to do that in my writing and on occasions when I go down to the café and dance to forget age, space, and time.”
8 days before her 60th birthday
“I will be 62 on June 27 and have lived double that age. Nevertheless, I cannot really complain. I am still very much on deck, though the deck has changed. It no longer gives me the outlook over the large vista nor the chances to act I once had, but I can [putter] around in my garden and get whatever joy flowers can give and occasional visits from my dear ones and my few real friends.”
“…[Aging] is the most bitter pill for me to swallow. More bitter than my own lack of opportunity to make the years left me count in the social struggle as it has counted in the past… You are still young and the future may yet enable you to realize your dreams. We have no such hopes. No, we do not feel old in spirit and passionate longing. But neither can we kid ourselves as to the years… Nor is it much comfort to know that we have tilled the soil and perhaps have implanted the seed. Of what good is that when we cannot also have some share in the harvest?”
“For myself I wish to say that I have been so furiously busy living my life that I had not a moment left to look at it. I am aware that a period comes to everybody when we are obliged, perforce, to sit back and look at life. That period is a wise old age, but never having grown wise, I do not expect to reach that point. Most people who look at life never live it. What they see is not life but a mere shadow of it.
Naturally, life presents itself in different forms to different ages… When I was 15, I suffered from unrequited love, and I wanted to commit suicide in a romantic way by drinking a lot of vinegar. I thought that would make me look ethereal and interesting, very pale and poetic when in my grave, but at 16, I decided on a more exalted death. I wanted to dance myself to death.
The death of those Chicago martyrs [who