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From the Encyclopedia of Life Writing, ed. Margaretta Jolly, Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001, pp. 385-286.
                                   
“Life in all its variety and fullness is art, the highest art.” This thesis, from a lecture the anarchist Emma Goldman gave in 1909, is rendered near the middle of her two-volume, one-thousand pages long autobiography. In this sense, Living My Life is highest art: passionate, rich, intimate and educative art. It is a unique mix of political thriller, love stories, and self-made hagiography. It depicts the intellectual and émigré communities in the United States and in Europe from the 1980s to the 1920s, but also the conditions of seamstresses and artist, prostitutes and prisoners. The dialogues between ‘Red Emma’ and her audience during mass meetings are often hilarious. Even when Goldman’s remembering regresses to mere name-dropping, it has a stunning scope. 

Living My Life contains some scenes that were to define feminist consciousness in the late 20th century. The most classic of theme features young Emma who is reproached by a
male comrade for dancing “with … reckless abandon”. Emma gets furious: “I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy.” (p.56) That the private is political has been the cornerstone of contemporary feminism, and this is probably the earliest explicit recording of this thesis in life writing. 

The tone of Goldman’s autobiography is direct and intense. There are unique depictionäs of female aggression: Goldman smashes a jewelry shop, fights with the police and quarrles with her comrades, and once even publicly whoips a fellow anarchist. The work follows the genre of a testimony, with its urgent necessity of bearing witness to the times. This is typical for other autobiographies by Russian women written in the interwar period. It stems from a tradition of political activism in which women have perceived themselves not as dependents, but as political subjects. Goldman’s native revolutionary heroes of the 1860s and 1870s included many women, some of whom she eventually met in the United States. 

Goldman wanted to set an example of how political idealism can direct one’s life. Her protagonist always adheres to such principles, whether refusing to sue for slander because she did not believe in the legal system, or of accepting the obsessional promiscuity of her long-time lover Ben Reitman. However, she also acknowledges her doubts and ambivalence.  In public life, the question of political violence represents the biggest ambivalence. Goldman’s life-long comrade, Alexandr Berkman, made a failed attempt to murder a prominent businessman in 1892. While he spent 14 years in prison, she became famous, travelled and had several love relationships. Her sorrow for ‘Sasha’ was not only due to his terrible conditions in prison; she also began to doubt the effectiveness (if not the legitimacy) of political  murder, although it was hard to express this openly, as it would have annihilated the importance of Berkman’s sacrifice. In they years 1921-23, Goldman and Berkman visited Soviet Russia. In this case, neither of them accepted the motives for political violence given by the Bolsheviks, especially as it was directed also against anarchists. A third of the second volume renders Goldman’s discussions in Soviet Russia with Lenin, Maxim Gorky, Alexandra Kollontay, and others. In today’s post-Soviet world Goldman’s views appear almost self-evident, but when she recorded them they were neglected by most of the European left.

In Goldman’s private life, there was a tension between life of an activist and her need for loving care. She had many happy relationships, but lived without a partner when she wrote her memories, which may have influenced her pessimistic summaries. She comments on one affair in 1923 by saying how she longed for “two months of personal life in a lifetime that had never been my own. In vain!” (p.942). Neither did Goldman have any children, having chosen not to have surgery for infertility. Her commentaries about motherhood are contradictory, describing strong longings - “I had loved children madly, ever since I could remember” (p.58) - but also her “feelings for motherhood in general, that blind, dumb force /that wastes/ woman’s youth and strength” (p.340). 

The feminist movement of the 1970s was fascinated by the life of Emma Goldman. Several
biographies appeared in the 1980s and new or abridged editions of the autobiography were published. However, Living My Life apparently did not fit as well into the narrative orientation of the 1990s and references to Goldman’s work are usually missing from recent autobiographical studies. 

The monumental subject of Living My Life and the impact it has had is comparable only to
Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiographical series. Apart from describing the lives of pioneer women intellectuals, the two works have several themes in common: the commitment to a life-long relationship with a man as well as to free love, the choice not to have children of their own, and question of how to relate to state socialism. On the basis of what we know today, it seems as if Goldman succeeded better in living as she preached. Goldman’s political vision is also surprisingly close to what has in the 1990s been called reflective life politics. It enabled her to discuss birth control, imperialism, homosexuality, jealousy, and the quest for world peace during the same lecture series. Its big difference from contemporary politics, amply manifested in her autobiography, is that Goldman’s life work was based on the possibility of profound socio-economic change. 
 

Life Writings: Living My Life. Alfred Knopf, 1931; London: Pluto Press, 1987. 

Further Reading: 
Falk, Candace, Love, Anarchy and Emma Goldman, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984. 
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Lives and Times”, in In the Shadow of the Revoluton: Life Stories of
Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and
Yuri Slezkine. 2000. 
Rowbotham, Sheila, “Introduction - Daughter of the Dream”, in Living My Life by Emma
Goldman: v-xxvi, London: Pluto Press, 1987. 
Wexler, Alice, Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life, London: Virago Press, 1984. 
 

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