Emma Goldman Anarchist

When you think of the term ‘anarchist’, you would imagine some crazy person who’s against the status quo and wants to destroy society as we know it. Someone who sets fires to random buildings all the time and yells their message of overthrowing the only thing keeping society together to the uninterested passerby. A person whose ideas are just so obscure that they couldn’t possibly work in a modern society. Emma Goldman was one of these labeled ‘anarchists’, who supported equality for women, freedom of love, worker’s rights, free & universal education, and many more items, all of which that were deemed ‘unpopular’ for the time. She herself labeled herself as an ‘anarchist’ because she believed that anarchy was about wanting a better society that would be led by citizens rather than by a government. Despite all this, Goldman was not an anarchist, rather a revolutionary: because she had thoughts that differed from the thoughts and ideas that were popular in her time, that are now very prominent. Nowadays, she would be labeled as a ‘liberal’ or ‘feminist’, labels that don’t have any strong predisposition to them (unless of course you are on the conservative …show more content…
She published a newspaper that supported her infamous views in the early 1900s, saying that she “...would voice without fear every unpopular cause.” (PBS, 1)4 Writing for an unpopular cause is not anarchy, as far as anyone is concerned, since she was simply writing her views on societal life, and not too much about the government or related topics. She also gave multiple speeches on the topics of patriotism, conscription, freedom of speech, feminism, and many more topics that were related to the social construct of society. Although she did discuss some topics related to anarchism, those few mentions in her whole history of speaking against the social construct do not affect the type of person she was and what she stood