Voltairine de Cleyre Archive
Natural-Born, American Anarchist and Rebel

(November 17, 1866 – June 20, 1912)


Voltairine de Cleyre Voltairine de Cleyre

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



voltairine photo
Photo by (No photographer credit, 1914),
released under Public Domain
voltairine photo
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

anarchy
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

anarchy
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)