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Emma Goldman was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches. She was lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and derided as an advocate of politically-motivated murder and violent revolution by her critics. Born in Kaunas, Lithuania to an Orthodox Jewish family, Goldman suffered from a violent relationship with her father. Although she attended schools in Königsberg, her father refused to allow her further education when the family moved to St. Petersburg. Still, she read voraciously and educated herself . She moved with her sister Helena to Rochester, New York at sixteen. Married briefly in 1887, she divorced her husband quickly thereafter and moved to New York City. Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket Riot, Goldman was trained by Johann Most in public speaking. Alexander Berkman became her lifelong intimate friend. They planned to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, but Frick survived. Goldman herself was imprisoned several times in the years that followed. Goldman also published an anarchist journal called Mother Earth. In 1917 Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to jail for disrupting the draft. After their release from prison, they were deported to Russia. Goldman quickly voiced her opposed to the Soviet use of violence and the repression. In 1923 she wrote a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. She wrote an autobiography called Living My Life, and participated in that nation's civil war. She died in Toronto on 14 May 1940. Goldman played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in the United States and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism.
