Voltairine de Cleyre (November 17, 1866 – June 20, 1912) was an American anarchist writer and feminist. She was a prolific writer and speaker, opposing the state, marriage, and the domination of religion over sexuality and women's lives. She began her activist career in the freethought movement. De Cleyre was initially drawn to individualist anarchism but evolved through mutualism to an "anarchism without adjectives." She believed that any system was acceptable as long as it did not involve force. She was a colleague of Emma Goldman, with whom she maintained a relationship of respectful disagreement on many issues. Many of her essays were in the Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, published posthumously by Mother Earth in 1914. She was known as an excellent speaker and writerin the opinion of biographer Paul Avrich, she was "a greater literary talent than any other American anarchist and as a tireless advocate for the anarchist cause, whose "religious zeal," according to Goldman, "stamped everything she did. She was close to and inspired by Dyer D. Lum, ("her teacher, her confidant, her comrade" in the words of Goldman), although she gave birth to a son, Harry, on June 12, 1890, fathered by freethinker James B. Elliot. Harry lived with Elliot by agreement between them, while De Cleyre had no further part in his upbringing, and Lum killed himself in 1893. De Cleyre based her operations from 1889 to 1910 in Philadelphia, where she lived among poor Jewish immigrants, and where sympathy for anarchist beliefs was common. There, she taught English and music, and she learned to speak and write in Yiddish. Voltairine de Cleyre's political perspective shifted throughout her life, eventually leading her to become an outspoken proponent of "anarchism without adjectives," a doctrine, according to historian George Richard Esenwein, "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." For several years de Cleyre associated primarily with the American individualist anarchist milieu. Her early allegiance to individualism can be seen in the way she differentiated herself from Emma Goldman: "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. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

• published: 02 May 2015
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