- Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912). American anarchist, freethinker, and feminist. Born in rural Michigan and educated in a Catholic convent, she converted to anarchism after the hanging of the Haymarket Martyrs in 1887. Most of her adult life was spent in Philadelphia, where she was a founder of the Ladies’ Liberal League and a teacher among the Jewish immigrant poor. An inspired speaker and writer, she published hundreds of poems, essays, and stories, mainly on themes of social rebellion, in Mother Page 315 →Earth and other journals of the day. Wounded by an assassin in 1902, she refused to press charges, returning good for evil in the spirit of Tolstoy. During her last years, she was arrested after a free-speech demonstration in Philadelphia, supported the Mexican Revolution, and taught at an anarchist school in Chicago, where she died in 1912. She was buried in the Waldheim Cemetery, beside the graves of the Haymarket anarchists whose martyrdom had inspired her life. Emma Goldman called her “the poet-rebel, the liberty loving artist, the greatest woman anarchist of America.”
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