Voltairine De Cleyre: Feminist and Anarchist writer lived in Grand Rapids in the 1880s

Emma Goldman once referred to Voltairine De Cleyre as, “The most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.” 

Voltairine De Cleyre was born in Michigan in 1866 and was named after the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire. She grew up experiencing poverty and then was forced to live in a Catholic convent by her father, who thought it would provide a better education for her. Life at the convent did have a positive effect, but not the one that her father had hoped for. What Voltairine developed was not only a critical understanding of the world, she would also eventually identify as an atheist because of the oppressive nature of the Catholic education.

By the early 1880s she moved to the Grand Rapids area and eventually to Grand Rapids and was active in the anti-clerical, Free Thought Movement. Voltairine soon began writing for various publications and exploring other political disciplines. However, it was the Haymarket uprising in Chicago in 1886 that finally brought her to embrace anarchism. More specifically, it was the hanging of the Haymarket Martyrs in 1887, that solidified her belief and commitment in political anarchism. 

There is an excellent zine produced by Sprout Distro in Grand Rapids on the history of Anarchism in Grand Rapids, with a section on De Cleyre that is worth citing:

Voltairine De Cleyre was one of the leading figures in the US anarchist space from 1890 to 1910, according to anarchist historian Paul Avrich. DeCleyre was born in the small town of Leslie, Michigan in 1886 and spent the majority of her childhood in St. Johns (both near Lansing). While she lived most of her adult life in Philadelphia, she spent a few years in Grand Rapids in the 1880s. These were important years of her life, marking the period when she became active in radical politics and eventually anarchism. De Cleyre was a prolific writer who wrote both political and literary works, contributing essays and poems to a wide range of anarchist publications. Central to her anarchism was her critique of gender which ran throughout her life’s work, making her one of the major theorists of anarcho-feminism. Her positions with regard to gender were considerable more radical than most feminists of her time (for example, she rejected gender essentialism) and is recognized by at least one of her biographers as “arguably the most radical, revolutionary feminist at the turn of the twentieth century.” 

In addition to De Cleyre’s deep feminist thought, she began devoting a great deal of time to the memory and legacy of the Haymarket Martyrs. In fact, between 1895 and 1910, she began to give speeches throughout the midwest and east coast on the anniversary of Haymarket, on May 1. Paul Avrich, the anarchist historian, eventually put together a collection of these Haymarket speeches by De Cleyre, in a small book entitled, The First Mayday: the Haymarket speeches 1895 – 1910. 

In the speech she delivered in 1906 in Chicago, De Cleyre shared these eloquent words:

For organizing war upon your system of slavery these men are obnoxious to you; and you seize upon an anonymous act of violence to accuse them of conspiracy! It is ever the coward’s word; and small wonder you impute it to others, in view of the miserable lies and tortures you resort to, to extort confessions of conspiracy from weaklings whom your cruelty drives mad. Well, this time you have overshot the mark. But you wiull not learn by it. So long as teachers rise up to teach the reconstruction of society without you, so long will you do them to death, imprison, persecute somehow until the working people in mass declare an end of your privilege. 

However, De Cleyre did not limit herself to writing just about the Haymarket Martyrs. She was a prolific writer of poetry and essays. In her poem entitled, The Burial of My Past, the anarchist wrote:

And now, Humanity, I turn to you;

I consecrate my service to the world!

Perish the old love, welcome the new –

Broad as the space-aisles where the stars are whirled!

Voltairine De Cleyre was an astute observer of the world. She wrote about anarchism and the particularly anarchism in America. She wrote about Direct Action, Crime & Punishment and the Paris Commune. In 1911, the year before she died, she wrote about the Mexican Revolution. 

De Cleyre stated, “The Mexican revolution is one of the prominent manifestations of the world-wide economic revolt. It possibly holds as important a place in the present disruption and reconstruction of economic institutions, as the great revolution of France held in the eighteenth century movement.” 

Voltairine De Cleyre died in 1912, at the young age of 46. However, despite her short life, she not only impacted those who heard her speeches, she continues to inspire generations of people who will consecrate their service to the world!

For more information on Voltairine De Cleyre, see Paul Avrich’s book, An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre, and The Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, edited by Alexander Berkman. 

Image used here is from a print made by GVSU student Katie Los.