Kate Millett

Writer and sculptor Kate Millett was an early member of National Organization for Women (NOW) and was the first chair of NOW’s education committee (1965-1968). She became a nationally known leader of the women’s movement after the publication of Sexual Politics

Sexual Politics analyzes misogyny in the works of several prominent male writers who present underdeveloped female characters as sexual objects. The book also includes a critique of the ways in which society has created and reinforced the artificial and dichotomous paradigms of “masculinity” and “femininity,” with power and control vested wholly in the masculine. According to Millett, this paradigm is so socially ingrained that “[m]any women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.”

Millett’s deeply personal autobiographical works, including Flying (1974),Sita (1977), and A.D. (1995), reveal the difficulties she has faced in her public and private life, including the furor following her public declaration of lesbianism, which became emblematic of the split among feminists during the early 1970’s.

She has also written The Basement: Meditations on a Case of Human Sacrifice (1979), about female victims of violence and the motives of both observers and perpetrators of this violence; Going to Iran (1982), about the repression of Muslim women in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini; The Loony-Bin Trip (1990), about mental illness and institutions; and The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment(1994), about political torture.

Emma Goldman

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.(Goldman)

Emma Goldman is known as a rebel, an anarchist, an ardent proponent of birth control and free speech, a feminist, a lecturer and a writer

Born in what is now Lithuania but was then Russia, in a Jewish ghetto, moved early to Königsberg and St. Petersburg, where she became involved with university radicals. Emma Goldman left for America in 1885 with her half sister Helen Zodokoff, working in the textile industry in Rochester, New York.

Briefly married in 1887, Emma Goldman moved in 1889 to New York where she quickly became active in the anarchist movement. She became one of the most outspoken and well-known of American radicals, lecturing and writing on anarchism, women's rights and other political topics. She also wrote and lectured on "new drama," drawing out the social messages of Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, and others.

Emma Goldman served prison and jail terms for such activities as advising the unemployed to take bread if their pleas for food were not answered, for giving information in a lecture on birth control, for opposing military conscription, and in 1908 she was deprived of her citizenship.

In 1917, with Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman was convicted of conspiracy against the draft laws, and sentenced to to years in prison and fined $10,000.

In 1919 Emma Goldman, along with her long-time associate Alexander Berkman and 247 others who had been targeted in the Red Scare after World War I, emigrated to Russia on theBuford. But Emma Goldman's libertarian socialism led to her Disillusionment in Russia, as the title of her 1923 work says it. She lived in Europe, obtained British citizenship through marrying the Welshman James Colton, and traveled through many nations giving lectures.

Without US citizenship, Emma Goldman was prohibited, except for a brief stay in 1934, from entering the United States. She spent her final years aiding the anti-Franco forces in Spain through lecturing and fund-raising. Succumbing to a stroke and its effects, she died in Canada in 1940 and war buried in Chicago, near the graves of the Haymarket anarchists.

Works:

• Anarchism and Other Essays. 
• The Social Significance of the Modern Drama.
• My Disillusionment in Russia. 
• My Further Disillusionment in Russia. 
• Living My Life.