--- title: "Emma Goldman" description: "Emma Goldman was an anarchist, feminist, and one of the most fearless critics of organized religion in the early 20th century. Her essays on Christianity and women's liberation remain searing today." canonical: https://opendoubt.com/people/emma-goldman source: html --- # Emma Goldman > Emma Goldman was an anarchist, feminist, and one of the most fearless critics of organized religion in the early 20th century. Her essays on Christianity and women's liberation remain searing today. Notable figure # Emma Goldman Anarchist, Feminist & Writer · 1869–1940 Emma Goldman was born in 1869 in the Russian Empire, emigrated to the United States as a teenager, and spent the next four decades as one of the most famous — and most prosecuted — public intellectuals in the country. She lectured constantly, edited her own journal _Mother Earth_, was repeatedly arrested for advocating birth control and opposing the draft, and was eventually deported to Russia in 1919 by a Justice Department run by a young J. Edgar Hoover. Her relevance to the long argument about religion is twofold. She was, very plainly, an atheist — but more interestingly, she was one of the first American writers to articulate atheism as a feminist position. Her essays of the 1910s — _The Failure of Christianity_, _The Philosophy of Atheism_, and the chapters of _Anarchism and Other Essays_on marriage and the “traffic in women” — argue that the religious construction of women as wives, mothers, and moral guardians was the structural foundation of their oppression. Strip that scaffolding away, and the entire economic and legal order of female subordination collapses with it. Core positions Religion is incompatible with human dignity Goldman's case against religion was not primarily metaphysical — it was political and ethical. She argued that the central religious idea, that humans are sinful creatures dependent on a divine master, was structurally identical to the political idea that workers are subjects dependent on a state. Both, she said, taught submission as virtue. Women's emancipation requires the rejection of religion She was one of the earliest American writers to argue that the legal subordination of women, the criminalization of contraception, and the sanctification of marriage as property were not separate problems but the same problem — each enforced by clerical authority and incompatible with a free life. Atheism as a positive project In The Philosophy of Atheism Goldman explicitly resisted the framing of atheism as mere negation. Her atheism was a commitment to this world, this life, and this set of fellow humans — the only material we actually have to work with. Free speech is the test of every regime Goldman was arrested repeatedly for public lectures on birth control, conscription, and atheism. Her experience made her one of the sharpest defenders of free speech in American history — across left and right alike — long before the term was rhetorically fashionable. > Religion is a superstition that originated in man's mental inability to solve natural phenomena. The Church is an organized institution that has always been a stumbling block to progress. Christianity, in particular, has been the most pernicious of religions. ## The Failure of Christianity Goldman’s 1913 essay is one of the great short anti-clerical documents in English. Written in Greenwich Village while she was being routinely arrested for speaking in public, it makes the case that Christianity’s historical record — its alliances with empire, slavery, war, and the suppression of women — is the relevant evidence against it, and that no amount of theological gloss can wash that record out. Read alongside her _Philosophy of Atheism_ (1916), it forms one of the clearest early-20th-century statements of what would later be called secular humanism: a refusal to outsource ethics to scripture, and an insistence that human beings make their own meaning in the only life they actually have. ## Essential reading [The Failure of Christianity1913Her clearest single statement on religion — short, sharp, and still in print](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-failure-of-christianity)[The Philosophy of Atheism1916Atheism reframed as a positive ethical commitment rather than a denial](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-philosophy-of-atheism)[Anarchism and Other Essays1910The collection that put her ideas in print — anarchism, women, religion, prisons, marriage](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-anarchism-and-other-essays)[Living My Life1931Her two-volume autobiography — one of the great American memoirs](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3478.Living_My_Life) ## Best quotes > “The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding, and beautifying possibilities.” > “Christianity is the conspiracy of ignorance against reason, of darkness against light, of submission and slavery against independence and freedom.” > “The most violent element in society is ignorance.” > “If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.” > “Religion! How it dominates man's mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion.” ## Where to find her work Read Emma Goldman [The Anarchist Library](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/emma-goldman)[Emma Goldman Papers (Berkeley)](https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Goldman/)[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman) Related thinkers [ Women & Atheism Female voices in freethought ](/women-and-atheism)[ Madalyn Murray O'Hair Founder, American Atheists ](/people/madalyn-murray-ohair)[ Bertrand Russell Philosopher & Atheist ](/people/bertrand-russell) Continue exploring [ Women and atheism More female freethinkers and the gender stakes of religion. ](/women-and-atheism)[ Quotes & criticisms More sharp critiques of religion from across the spectrum. ](/criticisms)[ Christianity The religion her most famous essay dismantles in nine pages. ](/christianity)[ Secular humanism The positive ethical project her atheism anticipated. ](/secular-humanism) ## Sources cited - https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-failure-of-christianity - https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-philosophy-of-atheism - https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-anarchism-and-other-essays - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3478.Living_My_Life - https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/emma-goldman - https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Goldman/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman --- _Canonical HTML version: https://opendoubt.com/people/emma-goldman_