ANSWER: Goldman's paraphrase

While this is Emma Goldman's most famous "quote," there is no documentation that she ever actually said or wrote this anywhere.

The quote is actually a paraphrase. An explanation, w/the original quote + context, is Alix Kates Shulman's article "Dances with Feminists" -- via the amazing Emma Goldman Papers site.

In her 1931 autobiography, "Living My Life", she put it like this:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. 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. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everyboy's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world--prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.
[Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1934), p. 56]

I was glad to see this clarif

I was glad to see this clarification.

Another alleged quotation worth clarifying is Emma Goldman's attribution to Henry David Thoreau, of words that continue to be passed along today (most recently in a review by Tom Hayden of new editions of _Walden_ (Orion, Jan./Feb. 2005).

Brought to trial in 1917, charged with conspiring to interfere with the draft, Goldman addressed the jury and related a canard whose source is still a mystery to me: "I may remind you of two great Americans, undoubtedly not unknown to you... Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. When Thoreau was placed in prison for refusing to pay taxes, he was visited by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emerson said, ‘David, what are you doing in jail?’ and Thoreau replied, ‘Ralph, what are you doing outside, when honest people are in jail for their ideals?’" (_Red Emma Speaks_, pages 372–373).

I wrote about this in the Summer 2004 issue of Thoreau Society Bulletin, and in the same issue a query was published asking readers for help in tracking down the source of this tale.

Chris Dodge

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.