The First Mayday: The Haymarket Speeches 1895-1910

by Voltairine de Cleyre

These speeches, delivered between 1895 and 1910 by anarchist agitator Voltairine De Cleyre, eloquently express the mood of US labor militants and confirm the last words of 'There will come a time when our silence from the grave will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!' With an introduction, notes and bibliography by Paul Avrich

Genres: History

54 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Voltairine de Cleyre 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.

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Various speeches delivered by anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre, 1895-1910...