"1972: Morre Leila Diniz

14/06/2007 - 06:00 | Enviado por: Lucyanne Mano

Aos 27 anos, ao voltar da Austrália, onde foi premiada como melhor atriz, no Internacional Film Festival, pelo desempenho no filme "Mãos Vazias", Leila Diniz morre num desastre aéreo [EM 14.6.1972], em viagem de volta ao Brasil. Mais tarde, seus últimos registros, documentados num cartão postal para sua filha Janaína e em seu diário, revelariam sua felicidade por ser mãe e estar em paz com a vida.

Uma mulher à frente de seu tempo.

Símbolo irreverente da resistência à ditadura nos anos 60, Leila incomodava aos mal-humorados de plantão por revelar uma fórmula alegre de vida, agindo sem hipocrisia, vergonha ou pudor, derrubando convenções e tabus. Defendia o amor livre e o prazer sexual, num tempo de machisto e conservadorismo absolutos.

Escandalizou a tradicional família brasileira em sua entrevista ao Pasquim, em 1969, onde falou abertamente sobre todos os assuntos, e disse: " Você pode muito bem amar uma pessoa e ir para cama com outra. Já aconteceu comigo". Essa matéria proporcionou a edição mais vendida do Pasquim em todos os tempos. E foi o estopim para a instauração da censura prévia à imprensa, mais conhecida como Decreto Leila Diniz.

Logo depois, repetiria a dose, ao exibir a sua gravidez de oito meses, na praia de biquíni e ao amamentar a filha Janaína diante das câmeras.

Não havia volta. Começava ai, a revolução feminina da década de 70 no Brasil.





Toda mulher é meio Leila Diniz.

25 anos depois de sua morte, o JB publicaria uma matéria especial em sua homenagem, em que algumas mulheres responderiam à pergunta: "O que você tem de Leila Diniz?".



Além do depoimento de Marieta Severo, participaram: Bete Mendes, Beli Araújo, Cecília Castro, Maria Júlia Goldwasser, Bia Lessa, Jandira Feghalli, Sandra Werneck, Marise Caruso, Ana Carmem Longobardi, Dafne Horovitz, Ana Maria Moretzsohn, Leila Pinheiro, Lucia Chermont, Bibi Ferreira, Marília Gabriela, Regina Abreu, Helena Severo, Maria Mariana, Graça Salgado e Mila Moreira.
 

(http://www.jblog.com.br/hojenahistoria.php?itemid=3264)

DOIS POEMAS (EM INGLÊS)

DE VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE

" 'Light Upon Waldheim'

(The figure on the monument over the grave of the Chicago martyrs in Waldheim Cemetery is a warrior woman, dropping with her left hand a crown upon the forehead of a fallen man just past his agony, and with her right drawing a dagger from her bosom.)

Light upon Waldheim! The earth is gray;
A bitter wind is driving from the north;
The stone is cold, and strange cold whispers say;
"What do ye here with Death? Go forth! Go forth!"

Is this thy word, o Mother, with stern eyes,
Crowning thy dead with stone-caressing touch?
May we not weep o'er him that martyred lies,
Slain in our name, for that he loved us much?

May we not linger till the day is broad?
Nay, none are stirring in this stinging dawn—
None but poor wretches that make no moan to God:
What use are these, O thou with dagger drawn?

"Go forth, go forth! Stay not to weep for these,
Till, weakened with your weeping, like the snow
Ye melt, dissolving in a coward peace!"
Light upon Waldheim! Brother, let us go!

— London, October 1897".

"Written-in-Red

(To Our Living Dead in Mexico's Struggle)

Written in red their protest stands,
For the gods of the World to see;
On the dooming wall their bodiless hands
have blazoned "Upharsin," and flaring brands
Illumine the message: "Seize the lands!
Open the prisons and make men free!"
Flame out the living words of the dead
Written-in-red.

Gods of the World! Their mouths are dumb!
Your guns have spoken and they are dust.
But the shrouded Living, whose hearts were numb,
have felt the beat of a wakening drum
Within them sounding-the Dead men's tongue—
Calling: "Smite off the ancient rust!"
Have beheld "Resurrexit," the word of the Dead,
Written-in-red.

Bear it aloft, O roaring, flame!
Skyward aloft, where all may see.
Slaves of the World! Our cause is the same;
One is the immemorial shame;
One is the struggle, and in One name—
MANHOOD— we battle to set men free.
"Uncurse us the Land!" burn the words of the Dead,
Written-in-red.

 Voltairine deCleyre's last poem".

(http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/Decleyre/poetrydecleyre.htm) 

"The Poetry of Voltairine de Cleyre

                                           Para Voltairine de Cleyre,

                                           em memória

Voltairine de Cleyre
Nascimento	17 de Novembro de 1866 Leslie, Michigan (EUA)
Morte	20 de junho de 1912 (45 anos) Chicago, Illinois (EUA)
Ocupação	oradora, sindicalista e ativista anarquista
Escola/tradição	Anarquismo, Anarco-individualismo, Movimento Livre Pensar
Principais interesses	propriedade, liberdade, autoridade, justiça social, pobreza, sociedade.
Influências Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Clarence Darrow, Henry David Thoreau, Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, Dyer Lum
Influenciados Emma Goldman

Voltairine de Cleyre (17 de novembro de 1866– 20 de junho de 1912) foi uma ativista anarquista estadunidense. Foi considerada por Emma Goldman como "a mais dadivosa e brilhante anarquista já nascida nos Estados Unidos." Na atualidade ela é pouco conhecida, segundo alguns historiadores em consequência da pouca circulação de seus escritos bem como do curto período de vida.^[1]

Vida

Voltairine de Cleyre nasceu na pequena cidade de Leslie, Michigan, em uma família extremamente pobre que possuía laços com o movimento abolucionista estadunidense. Alguns de seus parentes participaram da famosa Underground railroad, uma rede clandestina que auxiliou dezenas de milhares escravos em suas fugas para territórios sem escravidão. Seu nome foi escolhido em homenagem ao famoso filósofo francês Voltaire - fatos de sua biografia que contribuiriam para a formação de sua retórica libertária pouco depois de sua adolescência

Ainda adolescente foi matriculada em um convento Católico em Sarnia, Ontário, Canadá, já que seu pai não podia sustentar a família a beira do desespero. Esta experiência teve o efeito de aproximá-la mais do ateísmo do que do Cristianismo. Sobre o tempo que passou lá ela disse, "este tem sido como o Vale das Sobras da Morte, existem cicatrizes brancas em minha alma, onde a ignorância e superstição queimaram-me com seu fogo infernal nesses dias sufocantes".^[2] Mais de uma vez ela tentou fugir, uma delas nadando na água gélida do Porto de Huron Michigan, e andando 17 milhas ao fim das quais acabou por encontrar amigos de sua família que contataram seu pai e a mandaram de volta. De nada adiantaria, pouco tempo depois ela conseguiu fugir novamente para nunca mais voltar.

Após o período no convento de Cleyre se envolveu com o movimento intelectual anticlerical Movimento Livre Pensador contribuindo com artigos para periódicos do Movimento Livre Pensador.

 

Um panfleto anunciando um evento em memória de De Cleyre ocorrido alguns dias após sua morte.

Durante o tempo em que esteve no movimento livre pensador em meados e no final da década de 1880, de Cleyre foi especialmente influenciada por Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, e Clarence Darrow. Outras influências durante sua vida foram Henry David Thoreau, Bill Haywood, e mais tarde Eugene Debs. Após a eclosão da dos protestos durante a revolta de haymarket em 1887, porém ela tornou-se uma narquista. "Até então eu acreditava na justiça essencial da Lei Americana de julgamento por juri," ela escreveu em um ensaio auto-biográfico, "Após aquilo eu nunca pude".^[2]

Ela também foi conhecida como uma ótima discursista e escritora - na opinião do biografo Paul Avrich, ela teve "um talento literário maior do que quanquer outro Anarquista Americano"^[3] - e como uma incansável defensora da causa anarquista, cujo "zelo religioso," de segundo Goldman, "marcou tudo que ela fez."^[4]

Ela foi próxima e inspirada por Dyer D. Lum, ("seu professor, seu confiado, seu camarada" nas palavras de Goldman^[5]) até Lum cometer suicídio em 1893. Em 12 de Junho de 1890, ela teve um filho, Harry, criado pelo livre pensador James B. Elliot; contudo, a criança foi tomada dela quando ela se recusou a viver com Elliot.

Durante sua vida ela foi afetada por doenças e depressão, tentando suicídio em pelo menos duas ocasiões e sobrevivendo uma tentativa de assassinato em 19 de Dezembro de 1902. A tentativa de assassinato seria cometida por, Herman Helcher, um ex-aluno seu que havia sido diagnosticado portador de crises de insanidade, e que ela perdoou imediatamente depois do ato. Posteriormente escreveria De Cleyre:

Teria sido um ultrage contra a civilização se fôssemos mandados para a prisão por um ato produzido por um cérebro doente. —[6]

O ataque no entanto, deixaria a libertária com sequelas permanentes na forma de uma dor de ouvido crônica e uma infecção na garganta que com frequência e de forma crônica afetavam sua habilidade de discursar e a sua concentração.

Voltairine de Cleyre morreu em 20 de junho de 1912, no Hospital St. Mary of Nazareth em Chicago, Illinois de meningite séptica. Ela foi enterrada no Cemetério Waldheim (atual Cemitério Forest Home), em Forest Park, Chicago.^[7]

Crenças políticas

A perspectiva política Voltairine de Cleyre é mudou ao longo de sua vida, e acabou levando-a a tornar-se uma defensora ardorosa do "anarquismo sem adjetivos", uma doutrina, de acordo com o historiador George Richard Esenwein, "sem qualquer etiqueta de qualificação como comunista, coletivista, mutualista, ou individualista . Para outros, [...] era simplesmente entendido como uma atitude de tolerância a coexistência de diferentes escolas anarquistas."^[8]

Por muitos anos Cleyre esse ligada primeiramente com o meio anarco-individualista americano. Sua prematura adesão ao individualismo pode ser notada na maneira que ela diferenciava-se de Emma Goldman: "A senhora Goldman é uma comunista, eu sou uma individualista. Ela quer destruir o direito de propriedade, eu gostaria de afirmar isso. Eu faço a minha guerra contra o privilégio e a autoridade, mediante ao direito de propriedade, o direito real que é próprio do indivíduo, é aniquilado. Ela acredita que a cooperação suplantaria inteiramente a concorrência, eu mantenho que a concorrência de uma forma ou outra sempre vai existir, e que é altamente desejável que exista."^[9]

Apesar da antipatia prematura entre as duas, Goldman e Voltairine respeitaram-se intelectualmente. Em seu ensaio de 1894 "Em Defesa de Emma Goldman e o direito de expropriação", Voltairine escreveu em apoio ao direito de expropriação mantendo-se neutra em sua defesa: "Eu não acho que nem um pouco de carne humana vale a pena todos os direitos de propriedade na cidade de NY [...] eu digo que é da sua conta decidir se você vai morrer de fome e congelar por falta de comida e roupas, fora da cadeia, ou cometer algum ato aberto contra a instituição da propriedade e tomar o seu lugar ao lado Timmermann e Goldman." ^[10]

Eventualmente, no entanto, de Cleyre foi movida a rejeitar o individualismo. Em 1908 ela argumentou "que a melhor coisa que os trabalhadores e mulheres poderiam fazer seria organizar sua indústria para juntos abolirem o dinheiro" e "pruduzir juntos, cooperativamente ao invéz de como empregador e empregado".^[11]

Em 1912 ela argumentou que a falha da Comuna de Paris foi devido ao "repeito a propriedade [privada]." Em seu ensaio, "The Commune Is Risen", ela afirma que "Em suma, embora houvesse outras razões pelas quais a Comuna caiu, o chefe foi o que na hora de necessidade, os Communards não eram mais Comunista. Eles tentaram quebrar as prisões políticas sem quebrar as [prisões] ecônomicas[...]."^[12].

"Socialismo e comunismo demandam um grau de esforço conjunto e administração que geram mais regulamentação do que é o coerente com o Anarquismo ideal; Individualismo e Mutualismo, descansando sobre a propriedade, envolvem o desenvolvimento da polícia privada, absolutamente incompatível com a minha noção de liberdade."^[13] Como alternativa, ela se tornou uma das mais proeminentes defensoras do anarquismo sem adjetivos. Em The Making of an Anarchist, ela escreveu: "Eu já não me rotulo, exceto como "anarquista" simplesmente."^[14]

Alguma discordância existente quanto a rejeição ou não de Voltairiene de Cleyre ao individualismo constitue em um abraço ao comunismo. Rudolf Rocker e Emma Goldman afirmaram tal coisa, mas outros, incluindo o biógrafo Paul Avrich, tomaram como exceção.^[15] Cleyre, ela mesma, em resposta a alegações de que tinha sido uma anarco-comunista, afirmou em 1907 que "eu não sou agora e nunca fui em qualquer momento, uma comunista."^[16]

"Direct Action", seu ensaio de 1912 em defesa da ação direta, é muito citado nos dias atuais. Nesse ensaio, de Cleyre colocou exemplos como a Festa do Chá de Boston, notando que "a ação direta sempre foi usada, e tem a sanção histórica das mesmas pessoas que agora a reprovam."^[17]

Legado

Voltariene de Cleyre foi uma proeminete anarquista americana, e como uma das primeiras mulheres de renome no movimento anarquista, ela foi aclamada por Emma Goldman como "a mais talensosa e brilhante anarquista que a America já produziu".^[18][19] Hoja ela não é muito conhecida, alguns biógrafos como Sharon Presley atribuem isso ao seu curto tempo de vida.^[20] Um coleção de seus discursos, The Fisrt Mayday: The Haymarket Speeches, 1895-1910, foi publicado pelo Libertarian Book Club em 1980 e em 2004, a AK Press liberou The Voltariene de Cleyer Reader.^[21] Em 2004, mais duas coleções de seus artigos e discursos foram publicados - Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine De Cleyre – Anarchist, Feminist, Genius editado por Presley e Crispin Sartwell e publicado pela SUNY Press, e o outro, Gates of Freedom: Voltairine De Cleyre and the Revolution of the Mind, da University of Michigan Press.^[22]

Referências

Bibliografia

Ver também 

• Maria Lacerda de Moura
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• Germaine Greer
• Louise Michel
• Lucy Parsons

Ligações externas

• Voltairine.org - Website sobre Voltairine de Cleyre, incluindo artigos e biografia
• Voltairine de Clayre no Word Cat
• Voltairine de Clayre no Anarchist Arquives
• Poemas de Voltairine de Cleyre no Daily Bleed     
•  

The libertarian movement of today dates from the early 1940s, the period of US participation in World War II. It underwent a very sudden and very substantial spurt of growth during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and has grown steadily ever since. There was an earlier libertarian movement in the United States, however, one I briefly mentioned a couple of months ago, when observing Benjamin R. Tucker's 156th birthday.

This "first libertarian movement," as the late Samuel Edward Konkin III used to like to call it, was largely Tucker's creation, centered around his fortnightly paper Liberty, which he published from 1881 to 1908, and his book store, Benj. R. Tucker's Unique Book Shop, which he operated at 502 Sixth Avenue near 30th Street in Manhattan for a couple of years during the first decade of the 20th Century.

The libertarian I'd like to discuss today was something of a star in that first libertarian movement, though her works and even her name are pretty close to forgotten today. Voltairine de Cleyre was born November 17, 1866, just after the end of the American Civil War, in a town called Leslie, in rural Central Michigan, about 20 miles south of Lansing. She was the elder of two daughters born to a French immigrant named Hector de Claire, who tried to earn a living as a tailor (without much luck), and his hapless wife, Harriet.

Hector regarded himself as a liberal and a freethinker — and by "liberal," of course, I mean classical liberal: this is the 1860s, remember. As a youth in Northern France, he had read and deeply admired the works of Voltaire. He decided to name his first-born daughter after the eminent French author. He taught her to read and write both French and English, and he noticed, not only that Voltairine had high intelligence and an unusual talent for schoolwork of all kinds, but also that she was, as they used to say back then, "high-spirited."

In 1878, when Voltairine was 12 years old, her father found himself face-to-face with an unexpected opportunity: if he were willing to move to Port Huron, a busy lumbering and shipbuilding town about 120 miles east of Leslie, he could make a lot more money. His tailoring services were more needed there, by far, and more appreciated. The problem was that his wife would not accompany him. Presumably, she found the bucolic atmosphere of a farm town more to her liking than a bustling lakeport many times larger.

In any case, Harriet remained in Leslie with Adelaide, her younger daughter. Hector moved to Port Huron with Voltairine. He and his wife seem to have agreed that this arrangement would be best, given the circumstances. On what Hector could earn in Port Huron, he could support two households; and he could exert his authoritative influence to try to curb what he called Voltairine's "restless" nature and her marked tendency to "willfulness."

Within a year, Hector had decided to enroll his elder daughter in a highly rated convent school, the Convent of Our Lady of Port Huron in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, just across the St. Clair River from Port Huron, Michigan. Hector seems to have been motivated in part by a simple desire to expose his intellectually gifted daughter to the best schooling he could afford. But it is clear from letters he wrote to his wife that he also believed a few years behind the convent's walls would cure the now-13 -year-old Voltairine of what he considered the "impudence and impertinence, so very prominent in her."

Then too, he told his wife in another letter, the convent would "refine her, so she has manners and knows how to behave herself and cure her of laziness, a love of idleness, also love of trash such as Story Books and papers." In addition, he hoped, it would "give her ideas of proprieties, of order, rule, regulation, time and industry, as I doubt not you know she needs."

Voltairine resisted her father's decision with all the energy and wiles she could muster. She wrote letters — first mournful, then increasingly angry — to her mother, first begging, then demanding, rescue. When it didn't come, she took matters into her own hands, running away from the convent, swimming across the river to Port Huron, then hiking nearly 20 miles west toward her mother's house, before making the mistake of contacting some family friends, whom she hoped would offer her something to eat and a place to spend the night. Instead, they contacted her father and sent her back to the convent.

Once there, she seemed to settle down and make the best of her situation. She excelled at her studies and graduated with honors four years later, at the age of 17. But inwardly, she never surrendered. She continued to regard herself as a prisoner, and as soon as she regained her freedom, after her graduation, she began working to undermine the institution that had imprisoned her for so long.

She returned to Central Michigan, moved in with her mother, and began writing for a weekly freethought paper called The Progressive Age. Before long she had joined the editorial staff of the paper. And as soon as her income was sufficient to support her, she left her mother's house for the last time and moved to Grand Rapids in Western Michigan. One thing led to another: her articles in The Progressive Age led to speaking engagements, and not many months had gone by before Voltairine de Cleyre (as she began spelling her name shortly after she began publishing), a mere girl of 19 or 20, was traipsing around Western Michigan lecturing on Tom Paine and atheism, among other topics.

Her biographer, the late Paul Avrich, reports that "for small fees she addressed the local free thought circuit in Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, and other Michigan towns." He notes that, "being a former pupil in a convent, she was a particularly effective speaker, as she could talk from firsthand experience, like the runaway slaves who addressed abolitionist gatherings before the Civil War."

Voltairine's speaking engagements led to further speaking engagements, and to opportunities to write for other publications. According to libertarian psychologist Sharon Presley, who coedited a recent anthology of Voltairine's writings, these other publications included The Freethinkers' Magazine, Freethought, and The Truth Seeker. And "as her reputation grew," Presley writes, "her lectures, including frequent tours for the American Secular Union, a nationwide freethought organization, took her to many Midwestern and Eastern states."

By this time it was late 1887 and Voltairine was 21, a rising young star in the freethought movement. Today, those who know about freethought at all usually associate it with organized atheism, with Robert G. Ingersoll as the Madalyn Murray O'Hair of the 19th century. But in fact there was much more to freethought than that. As another expert on Voltairine's life and work, the late Eugenia DeLamotte, has pointed out, freethought was

an eclectic movement that included atheists, agnostics, and deists as well as religious thinkers (Unitarian, transcendentalist, sometimes Quaker) who shared a scorn for religious dogma as a source of truth or authority; a rejection of biblical miracles and the divinity of Jesus; an aggressive, activist commitment to separation of church and state; and an insistence that human progress depends on the exercise of each individual's reason with regard even to subjects held most sacred.

There were many freethought periodicals and institutions in 19th century America that specialized in only one of these issues. DeLamotte notes, for example, that the American Secular Union, which employed Voltairine de Cleyre as a lecturer early in her career, placed its main "focus on separation of church and state."

Voltairine's personal definition of freethought was direct and to the point. Freethought, she wrote, was "the right to believe as the evidence, coming in contact with the mind, forces it to believe. This implies the admission of any and all evidence bearing upon any subject which might come up for discussion." DeLamotte commments that "among the many subjects that came up routinely in late-nineteenth-century freethinking circles were marriage, sexuality, birth control, women's rights, race relations, labor relations … and the relation of the individual to the state."

Little wonder, then, that, as Paul Avrich puts it, "between the anarchist and free thought movements there was a close and longstanding affinity. Both shared a common anti-authoritarian viewpoint and a common tradition of secularist radicalism stretching back to Thomas Paine," who was, of course, well thought of by "atheists and anarchists alike. Nearly all anarchists were freethinkers, and many … first came to anarchism through the free thought movement, in which they constituted a militant left wing within the local clubs as well as the regional and national federations."

By 1888, when she was 21 years old, Voltairine de Cleyre was ready to become one of those anarchists who had first come to anarchism through the freethought movement. The specific event which precipitated her involvement with anarchism as a cause was the Haymarket affair of 1886–1887. As Avrich tells the story,

The Haymarket affair, one of the most famous incidents in the history of the anarchist movement, began on May 3, 1886, when the Chicago police fired into a crowd of strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works, killing and wounding several men. The following evening, the anarchists held a protest meeting near Haymarket Square. Toward the end of the meeting, which had proceeded without incident, rain began to fall and the crowd started to disperse. The last speaker, Samuel Fielden, was concluding his address when a contingent of police marched in and ordered the meeting to be closed. Fielden objected that the gathering was peaceful and that he was just finishing up. The police captain insisted. At that moment a bomb was thrown. One policeman was killed and nearly seventy were injured, of whom six later died. The police opened fire on the crowd, killing at least four workers and wounding many more.

"Who threw the bomb," Avrich continues,

has never been determined. What is certain, however, is that the eight men who were brought to trial … were not responsible. Six of them, in fact, were not even present when the explosion occurred, and the other two were demonstrably innocent of throwing the bomb. Moreover, no evidence was produced to connect the defendants with the bombthrower. Yet all eight were found guilty, the verdict being the product of perjured testimony, a packed jury, a biased judge, and public hysteria. In spite of petitions for clemency and appeals to higher courts, five of the defendants were condemned to death and the others to long terms of imprisonment.

One of the five who had been condemned to death committed suicide in his prison cell the night before his scheduled execution. The remaining four men who had been sentenced to death were hanged as scheduled.

Finally, in 1893, after spending seven years behind bars, the three remaining Haymarket anarchists were officially granted a pardon by Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld, who destroyed his own political career by issuing that pardon. Avrich reports that Altgeld, in his message explaining the pardon, "criticized the judge for conducting the trial 'with malicious ferocity' and found that the evidence had not shown that any of the eight anarchists were involved in the bombing."

In effect, though Altgeld didn't put it in these words, the court convicted the men for espousing an idea — the idea that human life would be better without the State — an idea that was widely believed to have influenced whoever did throw that fateful bomb at the Chicago police. The four who were executed were put to death for having committed what George Orwell would call, many years later, a "thoughtcrime."

The execution horrified Voltairine de Cleyre — the more so because she herself, not yet converted to the anarchist cause at the time the original bombing took place, had called for just that fate to be imposed on the suspects in the case. "At the time of the explosion in May 1886," Avrich writes, she was nineteen years old." She had not yet left her mother's house for the last time.

Glimpsing the newspaper headlines — "Anarchists Throw Bomb in Crowd in the Haymarket in Chicago" — she joined the cry for vengeance. "They ought to be hanged!" she declared, words over which she agonized for the rest of her life. "For that ignorant, outrageous, blood-thirsty sentence I shall never forgive myself," she confessed on the fourteenth anniversary of the executions, "though I know the dead men would have forgiven me, though I know those who love them forgive me. But my own voice, as it sounded that night, will sound so in my ears till I die — a bitter reproach and shame."

She "dedicated a poem to Governor Altgeld when he pardoned [the last three Haymarket anarchists], and yet another after his death in 1902. She wrote a poem to Mathew M. Trumbull, a distinguished Chicago attorney who had defended the anarchists in two incisive pamphlets and appealed to the state for clemency." Nor was this all. "Nearly every year," Avrich writes, "she took part in memorial meetings to her comrades, delivering moving and deeply felt orations, the most powerful of her career." She moved to Chicago near the end of her life, died there, and was buried there, next to the Haymarket martyrs.

In a word, she did penance. She devoted the rest of her life to penance for what she regarded as her unforgivable act of prejudgment. Her penance was writing for periodicals, delivering orations and lectures, and otherwise working to propagate the doctrine the martyrs had espoused, the doctrine of society without the State.

She seems to have been that type of personality — the type of the penitent, the devotee, the true believer, the ascetic. So perhaps it was inevitable that she would choose a career as a penitent. It was, in any case, a practical choice. If there was anything other than writing and speaking that she could truly be said to know how to do it was penance. She had learned that at Our Lady of Port Huron. As she herself put it in 1903 in her essay "The Making of an Anarchist," "By early influences and education I should have been a nun, and spent my life glorifying Authority in its most concentrated form, as some of my schoolmates are doing at this hour within the mission houses of the Order of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary."

Crispin Sartwell, who co-edited an anthology of Voltairine's writings a few years ago with Sharon Presley, argues that in fact Voltairine "internalized the convent's modesty and asceticism," whatever her disagreements with its dogma. "Most pictures of her in later life," he points out, "show her in plain, high-necked garb that could almost be a habit. And her life of extreme frugality and devotion to her calling mirrored that of the nuns who helped raise her. She was often referred to by her acquaintances in religious terms as a priestess … or as the bride of her cause."

Whatever her personal motives might have been, however, this much can be said with confidence: once Voltairine joined the libertarian cause, she quickly became one of its best known exponents. She had been a 14-year-old prisoner in a convent school when Benjamin R. Tucker launched his paper Liberty and the first libertarian movement. Within a decade she was writing for Tucker and had become one of the luminaries of his movement.

Eugenia DeLamotte reports that while most of Voltairine's lectures were delivered "in the eastern and midwestern United States … she lectured also in England, Scotland, and Norway — sometimes to small audiences, but often to hundreds; sometimes to over a thousand." According to Paul Avrich, one appearance she made, "before the Social Science Club" of Philadelphia, was attended by an "audience of 1,200 [that] gave her a magnificent reception."

DeLamotte mentions one "1908 anarchist demonstration," also in Philadelphia, at which Voltairine addressed what a local newspaper reporter described as "some two thousand workers." Avrich mentions a rally she addressed in London at which she herself estimated that "ten thousand people packed together with upturned faces" were in attendance. And he reports that when Voltairine died in Chicago late in June of 1912, at the age of only 45, "two thousand mourners" turned out to witness her interment.

Voltairine never wrote a book, but certain of her essays are really neglected classics. Her essay "Anarchism and American Traditions," for example, appeared originally in 1908 and 1909 in the pages of Mother Earth, Emma Goldman's anarchist magazine. It is a true gem. I know of no better brief treatment of the issues around which it is so cunningly, artfully constructed: the ways in which anarchism is implicit in the writings of the American Founders, the absurdity of public education as a safeguard or cornerstone of a free society, the problem of widespread indifference to liberty. It is eminently quotable. It rings with a stirring spirit of defiance. It is fiercely intelligent. Whether incorporated into a course in "civics" or "political science" or simply included, with other readings, in a survey of American history, this piece should be required reading for every American high school student.

Of course, the essay is not perfect. In its last few pages, for example, it contains a few dubious and, at best, ambiguous economic references. Voltairine, like Tucker and many of his associates, was a mutualist. She also entertained some somewhat fanciful ideas about the supposed economic benefits of small settlements producing everything for themselves. But all libertarians of this period are a bit screwy in their economics — Austrianism had not yet been fully developed, much less spread to the English-speaking world.

And Voltairine showed that her heart was in the right place when she argued for an idea that had already come to be called "anarchism without adjectives." She wrote in 1901, for example, that "there are … several economic schools among Anarchists; there are Anarchist Individualists, Anarchist Mutualists, Anarchist Communists and Anarchist Socialists. In times past these several schools have bitterly denounced each other and mutually refused to recognize each other as Anarchists at all." A "far more reasonable idea," she proposed, is

that all these economic conceptions may be experimented with, and there is nothing un-Anarchistic about any of them until the element of compulsion enters and obliges unwilling persons to remain in a community whose economic arrangements they do not agree to.

A larger problem with a piece like "Anarchism and American Traditions" is that it is not in any sense an original piece of work. It expounds no ideas save those its author has learned from others. The plain fact is that, as Eugenia DeLamotte observes, "de Cleyre was not one of the great original theorists of anarchism at its most general level, although many of her lectures are brilliant and cogent syntheses of ideas drawn from her extensive reading of anarchist theory."

$15 $12

 

As a libertarian, Voltairine's strong suit was not original thought. It was distilling and packaging the original thought of others. She was, in Friedrich Hayek's sense of the word, an "intellectual," that is, a professional "secondhand dealer in ideas." Such figures rarely command much fame outside the compass of their own lifetimes.

"Journalists, teachers, ministers, lecturers, publicists, radio commentators" — Hayek ticked them off, the common types of intellectuals. How many of them enjoy any sort of renown beyond whatever they enjoy during the years when their own generation is in the ascendant? However great their skill with words, however great their skill at distilling and packaging, they are easily, and soon, forgotten. The fact that, nearly a hundred years after her untimely death, Voltairine de Cleyre should have a full-length biography devoted to her (though, alas, it is currently out of print) and at least three annotated collections of her work vying for readers' attention, suggests that she may have already achieved a degree of immortality never realized by most of her fellow intellectuals.