Voltairine de Cleyre
Voltairine de Cleyre in Philadelphia, 1901
Born(1866-11-17)November 17, 1866
Leslie, Michigan, US
DiedJune 20, 1912(1912-06-20) (aged 45)
St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, US
Occupation(s)Writer, lecturer, tutor
Signature

Voltairine de Cleyre (November 17, 1866 – June 20, 1912) was an American anarchist known for being a prolific writer and speaker who opposed capitalism, marriage, and the state, as well as the domination of religion over sexuality and over women's lives, all of which she saw as all interconnected. She is often characterized as a major early feminist because of her views.

Born and raised in small towns in Michigan and schooled in a Sarnia, Ontario, Catholic convent, de Cleyre began her activist career in the freethought movement. Although she was initially drawn to individualist anarchism, de Cleyre evolved through mutualism to what she called anarchism without adjectives and prioritized a stateless society without the use of aggression or coercion above all else.

De Cleyre was a contemporary of Emma Goldman but maintained a relationship with her respectful disagreement on many issues. Many of de Cleyre's essays were collected in the Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, which was published posthumously by Goldman's magazine, Mother Earth, in 1914.

Early life

Born in the small town of Leslie, Michigan,[1] she moved with her family to St. Johns, Michigan,[2] where she lived with her unhappily married parents in extreme poverty. She came from French-American stock and on her mother's side of Puritan descent. Her father, Auguste de Cleyre, was a native of western Flanders, but his family was of French origin. He named her after the famed French Enlightenment author Voltaire.[1]

At age 12, her father placed her in a Catholic convent school in Sarnia, Ontario,[3] because he thought it would give her a better education than the public schools. That experience resulted in her embracing atheism, rather than Christianity. Of her time spent there, she said that "it had been like the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and there are white scars on my soul, where ignorance and superstition burnt me with their hell fire in those stifling days."[4] She tried to run away by swimming across the St. Clair River to Port Huron, Michigan, and hiking 17 miles (27 km), but she met friends of her family, who contacted her father and sent her back to the convent.[3]

Family ties to the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad, the harsh and unrelenting poverty of her childhood, and being named after the philosopher Voltaire all contributed to the radical rhetoric that she developed shortly after adolescence. After schooling in the convent, she moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan. She got involved in the strongly anticlerical freethought movement by lecturing and contributing articles to freethought periodicals and eventually became the editor of freethought newspaper The Progressive Age.[5]

Freethinker

A flier advertising a memorial event held a few days after De Cleyre's death

During her time in the freethought movement in the mid-to-late 1880s, de Cleyre was especially influenced by Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and Clarence Darrow. Other influences were Henry David Thoreau and the labor leaders Big Bill Haywood and Eugene Debs. After the 1887 execution of several Haymarket protesters in Chicago, she became an anarchist. "Till then I believed in the essential justice of the American law of trial by jury," she wrote in an autobiographical essay. "After that I never could."[4]

She was known as an excellent speaker and writer. Her biographer Paul Avrich said that she was "a greater literary talent than any other American anarchist."[6] She was also known as a tireless advocate for the anarchist cause whose "religious zeal", according to Emma Goldman, "stamped everything she did."[7]

She became pregnant by James B. Elliot, another freethinker, giving birth to their son Harry on June 12, 1890. As de Cleyre and Elliot agreed, their son lived with Elliot, and de Cleyre had no part in his upbringing. She was close to and inspired by Dyer Lum ("her teacher, her confidant, her comrade", according to Goldman).[8] Her relationship with him had ended shortly before he committed suicide in 1893.

De Cleyre based her operations from 1889 to 1910 in Philadelphia, where she lived among poor Jewish immigrants, and sympathy for anarchist beliefs was common. There, she taught English and music and learned to speak and write in Yiddish.[9]

De Cleyre's grave in Waldheim Cemetery, Forest Park, Illinois

Throughout her life, de Cleyre was plagued by illness. Goldman said that she had "some disease of the nervous system which she had developed in early childhood."[10]

She survived an assassination attempt on December 19, 1902. Her assailant was Herman Helcher, a former pupil who had earlier been rendered insane by a fever and was immediately forgiven by her, as she wrote: "It would be an outrage against civilization if he were sent to jail for an act which was the product of a diseased brain."[11]

Death

De Cleyre died from septic meningitis on June 20, 1912, at St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. She is interred near the Haymarket defendants and other social activists at the Waldheim Cemetery (now Forest Home Cemetery) in Forest Park, a western suburb of Chicago. Goldman was later buried in this area of the cemetery as well.[12]

Political beliefs

De Cleyre changed her political perspective during her life. She eventually became a strong proponent of anarchism without adjectives, which was, according to the historian George Richard Esenwein, a doctrine "without any qualifying labels such as communist, collectivist, mutualist, or individualist. For others, [...] [it] was simply understood as an attitude that tolerated the coexistence of different anarchist schools."[13] For several years, de Cleyre associated primarily with American individualist anarchism. Distinguishing herself from Goldman and expanding on her support for individualist anarchism, 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. She believes that co-operation would entirely supplant competition; I hold that competition in one form or another will always exist, and that it is highly desirable it should.[14]

Despite their early dislike for one another, de Cleyre and Goldman came to respect each other intellectually. In her 1894 essay "In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation", de Cleyre wrote in support of the right of expropriation:

I do not think one little bit of sensitive human flesh is worth all the property rights in N. Y. city. [...] I say it is your business to decide whether you will starve and freeze in sight of food and clothing, outside of jail, or commit some overt act against the institution of property and take your place beside Timmermann and Goldmann.[14]

Eventually, de Cleyre embraced social anarchism over individualism. In 1908, she argued "that the best thing ordinary workingmen or women could do was to organise their industry to get rid of money altogether" and "produce together, co-operatively rather than as employer and employed."[15] In 1912, de Cleyre said that the Paris Commune had failed because "respected [private] property". In her essay "The Commune Is Risen", she stated, "In short, though there were other reasons why the Commune fell, the chief one was that in the hour of necessity, the Communards were not Communists. They attempted to break political chains without breaking economic ones."[16] She became an advocate of anarchism without adjectives and wrote in The Making of an Anarchist, "I no longer label myself otherwise than as 'Anarchist' simply."[17]

Some observers and scholars dispute whether de Cleyre's rejection of individualism constituted an embrace of pure communism. Goldman and Rudolf Rocker asserted that position, but others, including de Cleyre's biographer Paul Avrich, have not agreed.[18] In response to claims that she had been an anarcho-communist, de Cleyre said in 1907, "I am not now, and have never been at any time, a communist."[19] The anarchist scholar Iain McKay argues that de Cleyre's subsequent 1908 advocacy of a moneyless economy was technically a form of communism, even if she rejected the word "communist" to describe it.[20]

In her 1901 essay, Anarchism, de Cleyre wrote:

My ideal would be a condition in which all natural resources would be forever free to all, and the worker individually able to produce for himself sufficient for all his vital needs, if he so chose, so that he needs not govern his working or not working by the times and seasons of his fellows. I think that time may come; but it will only be through the development of the modes of production and the taste of the people. Meanwhile, we all cry with one voice for the freedom to try.[21]

"Direct Action", her 1912 essay in defense of direct action, is widely cited today. In the essay, de Cleyre points to examples such as the Boston Tea Party and notes that "direct action has always been used, and has the historical sanction of the very people now reprobating it."[22]

In her 1895 lecture, Sex Slavery, 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 it is 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."[23]

De Cleyre adamantly opposed the government maintaining a standing army and argued that its existence made wars more likely. In her 1909 essay "Anarchism and American Traditions", she argued that 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."[24]

Legacy

De Cleyre, Christmas 1891

As one of the few women of stature in the anarchist movement, de Cleyre was acclaimed by Goldman as "the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced."[18][25] She is not widely known today, which her biographer Sharon Presley attributed to the shortness of her life.[18]

Since the late 20th century, there has been renewed interest in her. An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre, written by Paul Avrich, was published by the Princeton University Press in 1978. A collection of her speeches, The First Mayday: The Haymarket Speeches, 1895–1910, was published by the Libertarian Book Club in 1980. In 2004, AK Press released The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader.[26] In 2005, two more collections of her speeches and articles were published: Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine De Cleyre – Anarchist, Feminist, Genius, edited by Presley and Crispin Sartwell and published by SUNY Press,[27] and Gates of Freedom: Voltairine De Cleyre and the Revolution of the Mind, from University of Michigan Press.[28] Her papers are held at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, in New York City.[29] In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary for her.[30]

Literature

  • 2005 - Sharon Presley and Crispin Sattwell (ed). Exquisite rebel. The essays of The Voltairine de Cleyre. Feminist, anarchist, genius. State University of New York Press
  • 2004 - The Voltairine de Cleyre reader. AK Press
  • 1978 - Paul Avrich. An American Anarchist. The life of Voltairine de Cleyre, Princeton ISBN 0691046573
  • 1932 - Emma Goldman/ Voltairine de Cleyre, Berkeley Heights, New Jersey
  • 1914 - Selected works of Voltairine de Cleyre

See also

References

Sources

Further reading

  • DeLamotte, Eugenia (2003). "Refashioning the Mind: The Revolutionary Rhetoric of Voltairine de Cleyre". Legacy. 20 (1/2): 153–174. doi:10.1353/leg.2003.0047. ISSN 0748-4321. JSTOR 25679454. S2CID 155085916.
  • Palczewski, Catherine Helen. 1995. "Voltairine de Cleyre: Sexual Slavery and Sexual Pleasure in the Nineteenth Century". NWSA (National Women's Studies Association) Journal, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Autumn 1995), pp. 54–68.
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