Women’s History Month: Emma Goldman
In honor of Women’s History Month 2011, I’ve selected one woman to profile every day from March 1st - March 31st, 2011.
Emma Goldman: Anarchist, activist, atheist
The conception of gods originated in fear and curiosity. Primitive man, unable to understand the phenomena of nature and harassed by them, saw in every terrifying manifestation some sinister force expressly directed against him; and as ignorance and fear are the parents of all superstition, the troubled fancy of primitive man wove the God idea.
Very aptly, the world-renowned atheist and anarchist, Michael Bakunin, says in his great work God and the State: “All religions, with their gods, their demi-gods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the prejudiced fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but the mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovered his own image, but enlarged and reversed - that is divinised. The history of religions, of the birth, grandeur, and the decline of the gods who had succeeded one another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the development of the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind. As fast as they discovered, in the course of their historically progressive advance, either in themselves or in external nature, a quality, or even any great defect whatever, they attributed it to their gods, after having exaggerated and enlarged it beyond measure, after the manner of children, by an act of their religious fancy… . With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians or poets: the idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.”
Thus the God idea, revived, readjusted, and enlarged or narrowed, according to the necessity of the time, has dominated humanity and will continue to do so until man will raise his head to the sunlit day, unafraid and with an awakened will to himself. In proportion as man learns to realize himself and mold his own destiny theism becomes superfluous. How far man will be able to find his relation to his fellows will depend entirely upon how much he can outgrow his dependence upon God.
Already there are indications that theism, which is the theory of speculation, is being replaced by Atheism, the science of demonstration; the one hangs in the metaphysical clouds of the Beyond, while the other has its roots firmly in the soil. It is the earth, not heaven, which man must rescue if he is truly to be saved.
The decline of theism is a most interesting spectacle, especially as manifested in the anxiety of the theists, what- ever their particular brand. They realize, much to their distress, that the masses are growing daily more atheistic, more anti-religious; that they are quite willing to leave the Great Beyond and its heavenly domain to the angels and sparrows; because more and more the masses are becoming engrossed in the problems of their immediate existence. — Emma Goldman, The Philosophy of Atheism
Srsly? Did you think I was going to make it through the month without including Goldman?
Links: Wikipedia page
Bio (Jewish Women’s Archive)
Wikiquote page
Google timeline results
Friends of the Emma Goldman Papers (Facebook fan page)
Bibliography (Amazon)
Books by Goldman, Emma (free e-books through Project Gutenberg)
The Emma Goldman papers
Emma Goldman Finishing School
About Emma Goldman: An Anarchist’s Impression (9.13.1901 — archived newspaper)
“I Will Kill Frick”: Emma Goldman Recounts the Attempt to Assassinate the Chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company During the Homestead Strike in 1892
What She Is Like And What She Believes. - - - An Interview with Emma Goldman - - - Ibsen and Hauptman Used in Her Lectures.; Character Study by One Who Had Never Seen or Heard Her Before. (1909)
An ‘exceedingly dangerous woman’:Emma Goldman’s story
Emma Goldman: Feminist of the Day? (on the famous “If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution” quote attributed to Goldman)
Anarchy in Interpretation: The Life of Emma Goldman
Homo History: Emma Goldman
Obituary for Texan anarchist Ross Winn written by Emma Goldman.
Emma Goldman: a thoroughly modern anarchist
Emma Goldman’s obituary (orginally from the NYT)
