Voltairine de Cleyre

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 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 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 respectful 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. Born in the small town of Leslie, Michigan, she moved with her family to St. Johns, Michigan, 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. At age 12, her father placed her in a Catholic convent school in Sarnia, Ontario, 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." She tried to run away by swimming across the St.

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Related concepts (12)

Mutualism (economic theory)

Mutualism is an anarchist school of thought and economic theory that advocates a socialist society based on free markets and usufructs, i.e. occupation and use property norms. One implementation of this system involves the establishment of a mutual-credit bank that would lend to producers at a minimal interest rate, just high enough to cover administration. Mutualism is based on a version of the labor theory of value that it uses as its basis for determining economic value.

Social anarchism

Social anarchism, also known as left-wing anarchism or socialist anarchism, is the branch of anarchism that sees liberty and social equality as interrelated. It advocates for a social revolution to remove oppressive forms of hierarchy, such as capitalism and the state. In their place, social anarchists encourage social collaboration through mutual aid and envision non-hierarchical forms of social organization, such as voluntary associations.

Anarchism without adjectives

Anarchism without adjectives is a pluralist tendency of anarchism that opposes sectarianism and advocates for cooperation between different anarchist schools of thought. First formulated by the Spanish anarchists Ricardo Mella and Fernando Tarrida del Mármol, as a way to bridge the ideological divide between the collectivists and communist factions, it was later adopted by the Italian communist Errico Malatesta and the American individualist Voltairine de Cleyre.