The pop-culture image of Emma Goldman as a joyful, dancing bohemian hides a far more volatile reality. She funded an assassination attempt, terrified U.S. presidents, and was routinely labeled one of the most dangerous people in America. This episode tears up the tote-bag myth.

We trace her radicalization from a childhood of patriarchal violence in the Russian Empire to the sweatshops of New York, and how the 1886 Haymarket affair turned a teenage immigrant into an internationally famous anarchist who laid groundwork for modern civil liberties.

• The theory of propaganda of the deed and the Homestead plot with Alexander Berkman
• Why she refused to condemn President McKinley’s assassin
• Founding Mother Earth and expanding her fight to free speech and sexuality
• Her anti-state opposition to the women’s suffrage movement
• Deportation to Russia, disillusionment at Kronstadt, and vindication in Spain