Voltairine de Cleyre

Voltairine de Cleyre (November 17, 1866–June 6, 1912) was, according to Emma Goldman, "the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced"; yet, even among most anarchists, she is today almost completely unknown. Born on November 17, 1866, in the small town of Leslie, Michigan, as a teenager she was forced into a Catholic convent, an experience that had the effect of pushing her towards atheism rather than Christianity. Family ties to the Abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad, along with the harsh and unrelenting poverty that she grew up in, and being named after a philosopher (Voltaire), most definitely contributed to the radical rhetoric that she developed shortly after adolescence. After schooling in the convent, Voltairine began her intellectual involvement in the Free Thought Movement (it being primarily anti-Catholic and anti-clerical) by contributing articles to free thought periodicals and lecturing.

Within her time in the free thought movement in the early 1880s, de Cleyre was influenced by Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft especially, and also Henry David Thoreau, Big Bill Haywood, Clarence Darrow, and later Eugene Debs. After the hanging of the Haymarket martyrs in 1887, however, she became an anarchist. "Till then I believed in the essential justice of the American law of trial by jury," she wrote in a 1914 autobiographical essay, "After that I never could.

De Cleyre was known as an excellent speaker and writer — in the opinion of Paul Avrich, her biographer, she was "a greater literary talent than any other American anarchist" — and as a tireless advocate for the anarchist cause, whose "religious zeal," according to Goldman, "stamped everything she did.... Her whole nature was that of an ascetic." She believed in an "anarchism without adjectives." In The Making of an Anarchist, she wrote, "I no longer label myself otherwise than as 'Anarchist' simply."

Voltairine de Cleyre was esteemed by Emma Goldman and wrote an essay in her defense. However, the two women disagreed on some key points. In her 1894 essay In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation, de Cleyre wrote, "Miss Goldman is a communist; I am an individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property, I wish to assert it. I make my war upon privilege and authority, whereby the right of property, the true right in that which is proper to the individual, is annihilated." Eventually, however, de Cleyre was moved to reject individualism as well, "Socialism and Communism both demand a degree of joint effort and administration which would beget more regulation than is wholly consistent with ideal Anarchism; Individualism and Mutualism, resting upon property, involve a development of the private policeman not at all compatible with my notion of freedom." Instead, she became one of the most prominent advocates of "anarchism without adjectives", a movement in anarchism which focused on harmony between the various factions and did not advocate anything belong the basic conception of anarchism as anti-state and anti-capitalist.

Voltairine de Cleyre's 1912 essay in defense of direct action is widely cited today. In this essay, de Cleyre points to examples such as the Boston Tea Party, noting that "direct action has always been used, and has the historical sanction of the very people now reprobating it."

In her 1914 essay entitled Sex Slavery, Voltairine de Cleyre condemns ideals of beauty that encourage women to distort their bodies and child socialization practices that create unnatural gender roles. The title of the essay refers not to traffic in women for purposes of prostitution, although that is also mentioned, but rather to marriage laws that allow men to rape their wives without consequences. Such laws make "every married woman what she is, a bonded slave, who takes her master's name, her master's bread, her master's commands, and serves her master's passions."

Voltairine de Cleyre also adamantly opposed the standing army, arguing that its existence made wars more likely. In her 1909 essay, Anarchism and American Traditions, she argued that, in order to achieve peace, "all peaceful persons should withdraw their support from the army, and require that all who wish to make war do so at their own cost and risk; that neither pay nor pensions are to be provided for those who choose to make man-killing a trade."

Voltairine de Cleyre was close to and inspired by Dyer D. Lum, "her teacher, her confidant, her comrade". On June 12, 1890 she gave birth to a son, Harry, fathered by freethinker James B. Elliot. Throughout her life she was plagued by illness and depression, attempting suicide on at least one occasion and suriviving an assassination attempt on December 9, 1902. Her assailant, Herman Helcher, was a former pupil who she later forgave, writing "It would be an outrage against civilisation if he were sent to jail for an act which was the product of a diseased brain".

Voltairine de Cleyre died on June 6, 1912, in Chicago, Illinois. A collection of her speeches, The First Mayday: The Haymarket Speeches, 1895-1910, was published by the Libertarian Book Club in 1980 and in 2004, AK Press released The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader, edited by AJ Brigati.

External links

Collected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bright/cleyre/Cleyrearchive.html) "Voltairine de Cleyre" by Emma Goldman (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Writings/Essays/voltairine.html)