Voltairine de Cleyre.
Leonard Abbott’s Copy
Goldman, Emma. Voltairine De Cleyre. Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Published Privately by the Oriole Press, 1932.
8vo.; paper-covered boards, red cloth spine.
Boxed together with:
De Cleyre, Voltairine. “Anarchism And American Traditions.“ Chicago: (Free Society Group) 1932.
8vo.; pamphlet; illustrated wrappers.
First edition of Goldman’s essay commemorating the life of fellow anarchist Voltairine De Cleyre; 200 copies, the entire edition; this is one of the 50 copies printed on Nuremberg deckle-edge paper for private distribution by the publisher. Inscribed, For—Leonard Abbott with cordial regards of—Joseph Ishill April 1934. Joseph Ishill created the Oriole Press as a means of producing limited editions of specially designed works by notable authors. His books were not for sale, but were given away to libraries or to Ishill’s friends in the literary and political worlds. Among his other authors were George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, Havelock Ellis, Henri Barbusse and H.L Mencken. Leonard Abbott, a life-long friend of Goldman, contributed to Mother Earth as early as 1907 and worked with her at the Ferrer Center—the free-thinking, secular school founded by Goldman in New York City. He also helped organize a 70th birthday party dinner to raise funds for Goldman in her declining years.
Voltairine De Cleyre (1866-1912) came from a radical family of French-Belgian ancestry, steeped in the revolutionary traditions of 1848. But the father who named his daughter after the great French philosopher reverted to Catholicism and placed Voltairine in a convent. Too much of her namesake’s hatred of religious dogma and clericalism had already sank in, however, and the convent experience of the convent only sowed the seeds of future rebellion and anarchist activism. Like Goldman, De Cleyre was propelled into radical politics by the hanging of the Haymarket anarchists in 1887 and quickly became—after Goldman herself—the second most influential woman in the movement. They met in 1893: De Cleyre replaced Goldman on a Philadelphia speaker’s platform after she had been carted off to jail. Police harassment and even mob violence were another shared aspect of their lives: De Cleyre was shot in the face by a deranged follower and the wound left her with a permanent, maddening ringing in her ears.
Their private lives could not have been more different. Goldman—who could no more forego sexual companionship and passionate attachments than she could oxygen—was clearly perplexed and even saddened by the grim self-denial that characterized De Cleyre’s life. She found partial explanation in the sexist conventions of the age: De Cleyre was never able to find love or sexual fulfillment because men simply could not bear a brilliant, assertive woman. “Votairine’s emotional defeat is not an exceptional case;” Goldman wrote, “it is the tragedy of many intellectual women. Physical attraction always has been, and no doubt always will be, a decisive factor in the love-life of two persons.” Men were attracted to a woman not by her
brains or talents, but by her physical charm. That does not necessarily imply that they prefer woman to be stupid. It does imply, however, most men prefer beauty to brains, perhaps because in true male fashion they flatter themselves that they have no need of the former in their own physical make-up and that they have sufficient of the latter not to seek for it in their wives. At any rate, therein has been the tragedy of many intellectual women.
Goldman found De Cleyre a study rich in “human complexities”: she was a “woman who consecrated herself to the service of the submerged…the generous comrade whose heart went out to all who were in pain or sorrow,” yet she was also a woman exquisitely uncomfortable in the presence of other human beings. De Cleyre said of herself: “With the exception of a few—a very few people, I hate to sit in people’s company. …And no matter how good oth
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