Priestess of Pity and Vengeance, by Crispin Sartwell

If Joan of Arc were to be reincarnated as an American atheist, she'd be Voltairine de Cleyre. De Cleyre is an almost forgotten figure, but she committed her life to a vision of human liberation, a vision which encompassed even the man who tried to kill her. She was an incandescent writer and an original thinker, though she also lived much of her life in despair to the point of suicide.

De Cleyre and Emma Goldman in their own time were often mentioned in the same breath as the two great women of American anarchism. They had much in common. Both were celebrated speakers and writers. Both mounted scathing critiques of sexual oppression and the institution of marriage. They were active in the same circles and on the same issues, though de Cleyre was centered in Philadelphia, Goldman in New York.

But Goldman and de Cleyre were opposite poles of the same world. Where Goldman was a communist anarchist, de Cleyre was an individualist, at least early in her career. Where Goldman was an immigrant, de Cleyre grew up in rural Michigan. Where Goldman drew on the work of European thinkers such as Kropotkin and Bakunin, de Cleyre associated her thought with Americans such as Paine, Jefferson, Emerson, and the individualist writer Benjamin Tucker. Where Goldman was given to the free expression of desire, de Cleyre spent much of her youth in a nunnery and even after she rejected organized religion she remained quite a severe ascetic. And where Goldman was almost pathologically social, de Cleyre was fundamentally solitary.

They knew each other and admired each other from the soapbox and in print, though their relationship was not untainted by rivalry. Each thought the other ugly, and said so. Goldman wrote that "physical beauty and feminine attraction were witheld from her, their lack made more apparent by ill-health and her abhorrence of artifice." This is rather an odd assessment since many of her contemporaries described Voltai (as she was known to friends and family) as pretty, a view that is borne out by pictures. De Cleyre for her part called Emma a "fishwife," accused her of "billingsgate" (talking abusively) (A 135) and thought her vulgar and decadent. They hated each other's boyfriends as well; De Cleyre despised Emma's notorious Ben Reitman, probably in part because of his continual sexual advances toward her and anyone else who got within range. And de Cleyre's lover Samuel Gordon was a follower of Johann Most and supported him in his condemnation of Berkman's attack on Frick. When Most repudiated her lover and collaborator Alexander Berkman, Emma horsewhipped Most in public, and you will understand why she refused to allow De Cleyre to visit her in jail if she brought Gordon.

But they also grudgingly admired and publicly defended one another. In 1894, Emma was arrested for telling a crowd "Ask for work; if they do not give you work ask for bread; if they do not give you bread then take bread." De Cleyre delivered a speech in her defense which is one of the most astonishing documents in American letters. And after De Cleyre's death in 1912, Emma published an extremely moving eulogy in Mother Earth, which, though it contains the quoted observations about Voltai's appearance, is full also of praise for her work and her personality.