Voltairine
de Cleyre
1866-1912
“There is one common
struggle against those who have appropriated the earth, the money, and
the machines.”
Voltairine de Cleyre was educated in a Catholic
convent in Sarnia, Ontario but went on to become one
of the most prolific anarchist writers of her time, .
She was known for her opposition to capitalism, marriage, and the
state, as well as the domination of religion over sexuality and over
women's lives, all of which she saw as interconnected.
De Cleyre experienced two great epiphanies as a young adult. One was a
rousing speech by the well known defense attorney Clarence Darrow on
socialism. "It was my first introduction to any plan for bettering the
condition of the working classes," she said. The second was the trial
and execution of a group of Chicago anarchists accused of the Haymarket
bombing in 1886. As it did for many of her generation, the Haymarket
injustice sealed her commitment to anarchism.
De Cleyre lived a tragic life. At a young age she lost her greatest
love to suicide. In a later relationship she gave birth to a son, but
when she refused to live with the child's father, the baby was taken
from her. She did not see her son again for seventeen years. Another
misfortune took place in 1902 when she was shot by a lovesick student.
"Although she recovered," wrote Georgakas, "her always fragile health
was shattered. Characteristically, she refused to press charges,
stating her assailant should be sent to a mental facility, not a
prison."
De Cleyre based her operations from 1889 to 1910 in Philadelphia, where
she lived among poor Jewish immigrants, who made up the major
constituency of anarchists in the U.S. There, she taught English and
music, and she learned to speak and write in Yiddish. In 1912, at the
peak of her achievements as a writer and political apostle, she became
ill from "brain fever" and died in Chicago on June 12. She was buried in
Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago, beside the graves of the Haymarket
anarchists whose martyrdom had inspired her life.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/goldman-voltairine-de-cleyre-1866-1912/
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