It was at this period that she met
a young man who spoke Russian. With great joy the acquaintance was
cultivated. At last a person with whom she could converse, one who
could help her bridge the dullness of the narrow existence. The
friendship gradually ripened and finally culminated in marriage.

Emma Goldman, too, had to walk the sorrowful road of married life;
she, too, had to learn from bitter experience that legal statutes
signify dependence and self-effacement, especially for the woman.
The marriage was no liberation from the Puritan dreariness of
American life; indeed, it was rather aggravated by the loss of
self-ownership. The characters of the young people differed too
widely. A separation soon followed, and Emma Goldman went to New
Haven, Conn. There she found employment in a factory, and her
husband disappeared from her horizon. Two decades later she was
fated to be unexpectedly reminded of him by the Federal authorities.

The revolutionists who were active in the Russian movement of the
80's were but little familiar with the social ideas then agitating
Western Europe and America. Their sole activity consisted in
educating the people, their final goal the destruction of the
autocracy. Socialism and Anarchism were terms hardly known even by
name. Emma Goldman, too, was entirely unfamiliar with the
significance of those ideals.

She arrived in America, as four years previously in Russia, at a
period of great social and political unrest. The working people were
in revolt against the terrible labor conditions; the eight-hour
movement of the Knights of Labor was at its height, and throughout
the country echoed the din of sanguine strife between strikers and
police. The struggle culminated in the great strike against the
Harvester Company of Chicago, the massacre of the strikers, and the
judicial murder of the labor leaders, which followed upon the
historic Haymarket bomb explosion. The Anarchists stood the martyr
test of blood baptism. The apologists of capitalism vainly seek to
justify the killing of Parsons, Spies, Lingg, Fischer, and Engel.
Since the publication of Governor Altgeld's reason for his liberation
of the three incarcerated Haymarket Anarchists, no doubt is left that
a fivefold legal murder had been committed in Chicago, in 1887.

Very few have grasped the significance of the Chicago martyrdom;
least of all the ruling classes. By the destruction of a number of
labor leaders they t