The average American still holds to the belief that Anarchism is a
foreign poison imported into the States from decadent Europe by
criminal paranoiacs. Hence the ridiculous attempt of our lawmakers to
stamp out Anarchy, by passing a statute which forbids Anarchists from
other lands to enter the country. Those wise Solons are ignorant of the
fact that Anarchist theories and ideas were propounded in our
Commonwealth ere Proudhon or Bakunin entered the arena of intellectual
struggle and formulated their thesis of perfect freedom and economic
independence in Anarchy. Neither are they acquainted with the writings
of Lysander Spooner, Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews, William B.
Greene, or Benjamin Tucker, nor familiar with the propagandistic work of
Albert R. Parsons, Dyer D. Lum, C. L. James, Moses Harman, Ross Winn,
and a host of other Anarchists who sprang from the native stock and
soil. To call their attention to these facts is quite as futile as to
point out that the tocsin of revolt resounds in the writings of Emerson,
Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and other seers
of America; just as futile as to prove to them that the pioneers in the
movement for woman's emancipation in America were permeated with
Anarchist thoughts and feelings. Hardened by a fierce struggle and
strengthened by a vicious persecution, those brave champions of
sex-freedom defied the respectable mob by proclaiming their independence
from prevailing cant and hypocrisy. They inaugurated the tremendous sex
revolt among the American women--a purely native movement which has yet
to find its historian.
=Voltairine de Cleyre= belongs to this gallant array of rebels who swore
allegiance to the cause of universal liberty, thus forfeiting the
respect of all "honorable citizens," and bringing upon their heads the
persecution of the ruling class. In the real history of the struggle for
human emancipation, her name will be found among the foremost of her
time. Born shortly after the close of the Civil War, she witnessed
during her life the most momentous transformation of the nation; she saw
the change from an agricultural community into an industrial empire; the
tremendous development of capital in this country, with the accompanying
misery and degradation of labor. Her life path was sketched ere she
reached the age of womanhood: she had to become a rebel! To stand
outside of the struggle would have meant intellectual death. She chose
the only way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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