Voltairine de Cleyre Archive
Natural-Born, American Anarchist and Rebel
(November 17, 1866 – June 20, 1912)
About
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 women's lives 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, prioritizing a stateless society without the use of aggression or coercion above all else.
De Cleyre was a contemporary of Emma Goldman, with whom she maintained a relationship of respectful disagreement on many issues. Many of de Cleyre's essays were collected in the Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, published posthumously by Goldman's magazine Mother Earth in 1914.
Source: Wikipedia.org
Photo by (No photographer credit, 1914),
released under Public Domain
Photo by Sharon Presley and Crispin,
released under Public Domain
Articles
1887: The Dawn-Light of Anarchy
1890: The Economic Tendency of Freethought
1891: The Economic Relations of Sex
1893: Economics of Dyer D. Lum
1893: A Glance at Communism
1893: In Defense of Emma Goldman
1893: Some Nihilists I Have Met
1897: The Gods and the People
1897: Why I Am An Anarchist
1901: Anarchism
1901: The Eleventh of November, 1887
1903: The Making of an Anarchist
1907: A Correction on Anarchism
1907: Events Are the True Schoolmasters
1907: McKinley's Assassination from the Anarchist Standpoint
1907: They Who Marry Do Ill
1910: The Dominant Idea
1911: Tour Impressions
1912: The Commune is Risen
1932: Anarchism and American Traditions
Photo by Caratello,
released under CC BY-NC-ND License
unknown: Anarchism in Literature
unknown: At the End of the Alley
unknown: The Chain Gang
unknown: Crime and Punishment
unknown: Direct Action
unknown: The Drama of the Nineteenth Century
unknown: Dyer D. Lum
unknown: Francisco Ferrer
unknown: The Heart of Angiolillo
unknown: The Individualist and the Communist : A Dialogue
unknown: Literature the Mirror of Man
unknown: The Mexican Revolution
unknown: Modern Educational Reform
unknown: The Old Shoemaker
unknown: The Paris Commune
unknown: The Reward of an Apostate
unknown: A Rocket of Iron
unknown: Sex Slavery
unknown: The Sorrows of the Body
unknown: Thomas Paine
unknown: To Strive and Fail
unknown: The Triumph of Youth
unknown: Where the White Rose Died
Photo by Sharon Presley and Crispin Sartwell,
released under Public Domain
Poetry
1897: The Worm Turns
1891: Bastard Born
1893: The New Hope
unknown: Collected Poems (from Selected Works)
unknown: Collected Poems (from Collected Works)