Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth

By Peter Glassgold

Book Overview

In March 1906, Emma Goldman published the first issue of Mother Earth, a "Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature." Conceived as a forum for anarchists of every school and variety, Mother Earth laid the groundwork for American radical thought. It did more than report on the contemporary scene-it was part of the action-and its preoccupations preoccupy us still: birth control, women's rights, civil liberties, and questions of social and economic justice. Mother Earth appeared without interruption until August 1917, when it was killed by wartime postal censorship. Though Emma Goldman has since become a legendary figure, scarcely any material from her magazine has remained in print. This Mother Earth reader sets right this great wrong, and restores to public memory an important body of work-provocative writings by Margaret Sanger, Alexander Kropotkin, and dozens of other radical thinkers of the early twentieth century.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1582430403
• ISBN13: 9781582430409
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Counterpoint LLC
• Length: 428 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Red Emma's Mother Earth

Excellent anthology with witty, informative and intelligent prefaces to each chapter. Impossible to put down and sadly though most pieces were written approximately 100 years ago, the themes are as timely as ever/

A magnficent and long-overdue collection

Emma Goldman's magazine Mother Earth was one of the best and liveliest anarchist publications at the beginning of the 20th Century, but until this book was published almost everything which ever appeared in Mother Earth was nearly impossible to find. Peter Glassgold has done a fine job of culling some of the best works from the 5,000 or so pages of Mother Earth into this generous and fascinating collection.The book is separated into six sections: Anarchism, The Woman Question, Literature, Civil Liberties, The Social War, and War and Peace. Within these sections are articles by classic anarchist writers such as Alexander Berkman, Ben Reitman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Peter Kropotkin, and Goldman herself. There are also a number of works by writers you might not expect to appear in such a book: Eugene O'Neill (what is suspected to be his first publication), Ben Hecht, Louise Bryant, Margaret Sanger, and Maxim Gorky. Peter Glassgold provides an informative and readable introduction, and there is a comprehensive index as well as a section of photographs, mostly of the covers of issues of Mother Earth (some by Man Ray).Everyone interested in the history of anarchism, radical politics, and 20th-century thought should own this book.