De Cleyre, Voltairine, 1866-1912

Voltairine De Cleyre was an anarchist poet, lecturer, writer and teacher and a significant figure among the radicals of her day She was born in Leslie, Michigan on November 17, 1866. She lived in St. Johns, Michigan until 1880, when she was sent to a convent school in Sarnia, Ontario. After graduating from convent school, she became active in freethought circles, and then became interested in political change, moving from socialism to fervent anarchism.

From the late 1880s until her death in 1912, De Cleyre was an energetic anarchist and a prolific writer, living in Philadelphia and then Chicago. She was a contemporary and acquaintance of Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Benjamin Tucker and other prominent anarchists. Emma Goldman described her as “the poet-rebel, the liberty-loving artist, the greatest woman-Anarchist of America.” Max Nettlau, one of the foremost historians of the anarchist movement, considered her to be “the pearl of Anarchy,” outshining her contemporaries in “libertarian feeling and artistic spirit.” She published hundreds of poems, essays, stories, and sketches, mainly on themes of social oppression, but also on literature, education, and women’s liberation. She died on June 23, 1912 and was buried in Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago.

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 over women's lives, all of which she saw as 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 and prioritized a stateless society without the use of aggression or coercion above all else.

De Cleyre was a contemporary of Emma Goldman but maintained a relationship with her respectfully despite disagreement on many issues. Many of de Cleyre's essays were collected in the Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, which was published posthumously by Goldman's magazine, Mother Earth, in 1914.

Early life
Born in the small town of Leslie, Michigan,[1] she moved with her family to St. Johns, Michigan,[2] where she lived with her unhappily married parents in extreme poverty. She came from French-American stock and on her mother's side of Puritan descent. Her father, Auguste de Cleyre, was a native of western Flanders, but his family was of French origin. He named her after the famed French Enlightenment author Voltaire.[1]

At age 12, her father placed her in a Catholic convent school in Sarnia, Ontario,[3] because he thought it would give her a better education than the public schools. That experience resulted in her embracing atheism, rather than Christianity. Of her time spent there, she said that "it had been like the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and there are white scars on my soul, where ignorance and superstition burnt me with their hell fire in those stifling days."[4][non-primary source needed] She tried to run away by swimming across the St. Clair River to Port Huron, Michigan, and hiking 17 miles (27 km), but she met friends of her family, who contacted her father and sent her back to the convent.[3]

Family ties to the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad, the harsh and unrelenting poverty of her childhood, and being named after the philosopher Voltaire all contributed to the radical rhetoric that she developed shortly after adolescence. After schooling in the convent, she moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan. She got involved in the strongly anticlerical freethought movement by lecturing and contributing articles to freethought periodicals and eventually became the editor of freethought newspaper The Progressive Age.[5][better source needed] During her time in the freethought movement in the mid-to-late 1880s, de Cleyre was especially influenced by Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and Clarence Darrow. Other influences were Henry David Thoreau and the labor leaders Big Bill Haywood and Eugene Debs. After the 1887 execution of several Haymarket protesters in Chicago, she became an anarchist. "Till then I believed in the essential justice of the American law of trial by jury," she wrote in an autobiographical essay. "After that I never could."[4][non-primary source needed]

She was known as an excellent speaker and writer. Her biographer Paul Avrich said that she was "a greater literary talent than any other American anarchist."[6] She was also known as a tireless advocate for the anarchist cause whose "religious zeal", according to Emma Goldman, "stamped everything she did."[7][non-primary source needed]

She became pregnant by James B. Elliot, another freethinker, giving birth to their son Harry on June 12, 1890. As de Cleyre and Elliot agreed, their son lived with Elliot, and de Cleyre had no part in his upbringing. She was close to and inspired by Dyer Lum ("her teacher, her confidant, her comrade", according to Goldman).[8] Her relationship with him had ended shortly before he committed suicide in 1893. She survived an assassination attempt on December 19, 1902. Her assailant was Herman Helcher, a former pupil who had earlier been rendered insane by a fever and was immediately forgiven by her, as she wrote: "It would be an outrage against civilization if he were sent to jail for an act which was the product of a diseased brain."[11] De Cleyre died from septic meningitis on June 20, 1912, at St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. She is interred near the Haymarket defendants and other social activists at the Waldheim Cemetery (now Forest Home Cemetery) in Forest Park, a western suburb of Chicago. Goldman was later buried in this area of the cemetery as well.[12]