June 20, a day to commemorate the the life of one of anarchism's great writers, speaker, educator, Voltairine de Cleyre, who died 101 years ago on June 20, 1912, but still a voice for today.
Voltairine de Cleyre (November 17, 1866 – June 20, 1912) was an American anarchist writer and feminist. She was a prolific writer and speaker, opposing the state, marriage, and the domination of religion in sexuality and women's lives. She began her activist career in the freethought movement. De Cleyre was initially drawn to individualist anarchism but evolved through mutualism to an "anarchism without adjectives."
She believed that any system was acceptable as long as it did not
involve force. However, according to anarchist author Iain McKay, she
embraced the ideals of stateless communism.[1] She was a colleague of Emma Goldman, with whom she maintained a relationship of respectful disagreement on many issues. Many of her essays were in the Collected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, published posthumously by Mother Earth in 1914.
