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Portrait of Emma Goldman

Takuma Kajiwara · Public domain

Emma Goldman

1869 – 1940aged 70

Arrived in America at sixteen, was radicalised by the Haymarket executions, and spent forty years as the most effective anarchist agitator in the country — imprisoned for advocating contraception, again for opposing conscription, and finally deported to Russia in 1919. She then turned on the Bolsheviks with the same force she had used on capitalism, publishing My Disillusionment in Russia when much of the Western left preferred not to hear it. Her insistence that means corrupt ends has aged extremely well.

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