Voltairine De Cleyre

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) was an American anarchist writer, lecturer and poet. Born in Michigan to poor freethinking parents who named her for Voltaire, she was educated in a Catholic convent school and emerged a rebel against all authority. The hanging of the Haymarket anarchists in 1887 made her an anarchist, and she spent the rest of her life in Philadelphia teaching English to Jewish immigrants and writing essays, poems and lectures on anarchism, women's subjection, free thought and direct action. She survived a shooting by a former pupil in 1902 and refused to prosecute him. Emma Goldman called her the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.