Life
Born in the small town of Leslie, Michigan, she was placed as a teenager into a Catholic convent in Sarnia, Ontario by her father, because he thought it would give her a better education. This experience had the effect of moving her towards atheism rather than Christianity. Of her time spent there she said, "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 attempted to run away by swimming to Port Huron, Michigan, and hiking 17 miles; but she met friends of her family who contacted her father and sent her back. She graduated and received a gold medal from the school, which she can be seen wearing in the picture.
Family ties to the Abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad, the harsh and unrelenting poverty that she grew up in, and being named after the philosopher Voltaire all contributed to the radical rhetoric that she developed shortly after adolescence. After schooling in the convent, de Cleyre began her intellectual involvement in the strongly anti-clerical freethought movement by lecturing and contributing articles to freethought periodicals.
During her time in the freethought movement in the mid and late 1880s, de Cleyre was especially influenced by Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Clarence Darrow. Other influences were Henry David Thoreau, Big Bill Haywood, and Eugene Debs. After the hanging of the Haymarket protesters in 1887, however, she became an anarchist. "Till then I believed in the essential justice of the American law of trial by jury," she wrote in an autobiographical essay, "After that I never could".
She was known as an excellent speaker and writer – in the opinion of biographer Paul Avrich, she was "a greater literary talent than any other American anarchist" – and as a tireless advocate for the anarchist cause, whose "religious zeal," according to Goldman, "stamped everything she did."
She was close to and inspired by Dyer D. Lum, ("her teacher, her confidant, her comrade" in the words of Goldman), although she gave birth to a son, Harry on June 12, 1890, fathered by freethinker James B. Elliot. The child was taken from her when she refused to live with Elliot, and Lum committed suicide in 1893.
De Cleyre based her operations from 1889 to 1910 in Philadelphia, where she lived among poor Jewish immigrants, and where sympathy for anarchist beliefs was common. There, she taught English and music, and she learned to speak and write in Yiddish.
Throughout her life she was plagued by illness and depression, attempting suicide on at least two occasions and surviving an assassination attempt on December 19, 1902. Her assailant, Herman Helcher, was a former pupil who had earlier been rendered insane by a fever, and whom she immediately forgave. She wrote, "It would be an outrage against civilization if he were sent to jail for an act which was the product of a diseased brain". The attack left her with chronic ear pain and a throat infection that often adversely affected her ability to speak or concentrate.
Voltairine de Cleyre died on June 20, 1912, at St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital in Chicago, Illinois from septic meningitis. She is interred near Emma Goldman, the Haymarket defendants, and other social activists at the Waldheim Cemetery (now Forest Home Cemetery), in Forest Park, a suburb west of Chicago.
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