you can read the entire essay hereTHE LIFE AND TIMES OF EMMA GOLDMAN
A Curriculum for Middle and High School Students
Her talks were varied and expansive. It was not unusual for Goldman to speak on "The Intermediate Sex: A Discussion of Homosexuality" one night and "The Social Value of Modern Drama" the next. Appreciating literature and drama as powerful vehicles for awakening social change, particularly on sex and gender issues, Goldman welcomed the challenge of alerting and educating the American public to the importance of modern European and Russian drama. She believed that education was a lifelong process and that public schools often excluded open-ended discussions and provocative challenges to the status quo from the curriculum. As a proponent of the Modern School movement which fostered independence and creativity, she often asserted that a state-run school "is for the child what the prison is for the convict and the barracks for the soldier a place where everything is being used to break the will of the child, and then to pound, knead, and shape it into a being utterly foreign to itself."
This belief in the importance of widening the experience of the individual had specific ramifications for women. Goldman will be remembered for her pioneering work for the liberation of women, identifying birth control as an essential element in the larger battle for women's sexual and economic freedom. Goldman believed that the law that denied women access to birth control information was symptomatic of general social and economic injustice as well as the particular oppression of women. She was a political mentor to the young Margaret Sanger, though Sanger eventually parted ways with Goldman and shifted her focus to the single, more pragmatic goal of winning the legal right to distribute birth control information. Goldman continued to insist that the battle for woman's control over her body should be part of a broader struggle against the social, economic, and political conditions that fostered and reinforced inequality.
This was not the only time Goldman broke with the other feminists of her day; she criticized the women's suffrage movement for its claim that the vote was the best vehicle to secure the equality of women, pointing out that it would not adequately address the issue of the liberation of working-class women, nor ensure a gentler form of government.
Goldman spoke eloquently on the political dimension of personal life, and women, from within and outside of the suffrage movement, crowded into Goldman's lectures. Of particular interest was her lecture on "Marriage and Love" in which she articulated the liberating potential of free love in contrast to the stifling aspects of marriage for women. As an anarchist, she hoped to be the living example of her ideal. Yet privately she agonized over whether her own failure in love made her unworthy of delivering this message. Throughout her ten-year love affair with her road manager Ben Reitman, her passionate letters reveal dark feelings of jealousy written at the same time she spoke eloquently on the platform about the corrosive effect of possessiveness in love; similarly she wrote to Ben with a longing for security and rest, just as she became the symbol and the harbinger of the total independence of women. Her inner doubts and anguish prompted her to write to Ben that if she remained "an abject slave to her love" she would stand "condemned before the bar of [her] own reason."
Goldman's eloquence on the themes of personal life as they related to political and social forces was in part the key to her popularity. Threatened by her anarchist politics, her persuasive powers, and her discussion of topics often considered taboo, the police and local authorities frequently banned her lectures. Inevitably a debate over the rights of free speech would follow. Goldman's relentless assertion of the critical importance of the right to freedom of speech in a democratic society ultimately blazed the trail for the enforcement of First Amendment rights in America. Braving the mounting obstacles to free speech, Goldman paid dearly for her principles. Under surveillance most of her adult life, she was arrested and jailed countless times and spent her last eighteen months in the United States imprisoned on federal charges.
Her longest jail sentence was the direct result of her organizing efforts against the involuntary conscription of young men into the military. Within weeks of America's entry into World War I, Goldman and her old friend Alexander Berkman helped launch the No-Conscription League to educate and encourage conscientious objection to the war. In the past, Goldman had condemned U.S. expansionism during the Spanish-American War and denounced British imperialism during the Boer War, but the patriotic fervor surrounding World War I bred a more severe intolerance for dissent, considering such opposition to war a "clear and present danger" to the nation. The government had Berkman and Goldman arrested on the charge of conspiracy against the draft. They were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison with the possibility of deportation upon their release.
Alarmed by the post-World War I labor turbulence and by recurring bombing incidents, the Wilson administration retaliated against the most vulnerable radical and progressive organizations. Just after her release from prison on September 27, 1919, Goldman was re-arrested by the young J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Justice Department's General Intelligence Division. Writing the briefs and building the case against Goldman himself, Hoover quietly worked behind the scenes to persuade the courts to deny her citizenship claims and to deport her. On December 21, 1919, Goldman, Berkman, and 247 other foreign-born radicals were herded aboard the S.S. Buford and sent to the Soviet Union.
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Cur ... essay.html
