rict discipline and had preferred beatings to blind
obedience. Consequently she grew up in an atmosphere of repression and
acrimony. "Since my earliest recollection," she wrote, "home had been
stifling, my father's presence terrifying. My mother, while less violent
with her children, never showed much warmth."

At the age of thirteen she began to work in a factory in St. Petersburg,
and her life became doubly oppressive. She soon learned of the
revolutionary movement and sympathized with its agitation against
Czarist autocracy. To escape from the tyranny of her father, the
irksomeness of the shop, and the repressive measures of the government,
she fought with all her stubborn strength for the opportunity to
accompany her beloved sister Helene to the United States. Early in 1886
the two girls arrived in Rochester to live with their married sister,
who had preceded them to this country.

Like other penniless immigrants, the seventeen-year-old Emma had no
alternative but to follow the common groove to the sweatshop. Paid a
weekly wage of two dollars and a half for sixty-three hours of work, she
naturally resented the social system which permitted such exploitation.
Together with other immigrants she had dreamed of the United States as a
haven of liberty and equality. Instead she found it the home of crass
materialism and cruel disparity. This disillusionment was deepened by
the hysterical accounts of the trial in Chicago. She was quick to
conclude that the accused anarchists were innocent of the charge against
them; and the vilification not only of the prisoners but of all radicals
merely hardened her hatred against the enemies of the working poor.

It was easy enough for her to believe John Most's claim in _Die
Freiheit_ (which chance had brought her way) that Parsons, Spies, and
the other defendants were to be hanged for nothing more than their
advocacy of anarchism. What this doctrine was she did not quite know,
but she assumed it must have merit since it favored poor workers like
herself. When the jury found the men guilty, she could not accept the
reality of the dread verdict. Her thoughts clung to the condemned
anarchists as if they were her brothers. In her passionate yearning to
do something in their behalf she attended meetings of protest and read
everything she could find on the case; and she sympathetically
experienced the torment of a prisoner awaiting execution. In her
autobiography, _Living My Life_, she wr