However, Goldman’s openness brought an altogether human element to the sometimes inflexible realm of radical ideological thought. For her, life was about roses as well as bread. She is remembered as an earthy, bohemian woman who loved art, music, and sex, and saw no reason for a revolutionary to deprive themselves of beautiful things. This attitude gave rise to one of the most popular quotes attributed to her: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.”

Her journey out of Tsarist Russia and into a leading light of anarchism began on the factory floor and crystallized at the gallows. Though she had already been exposed to leftist politics by fellow workers at her factory job in Rochester, the 1886 Haymarket affair and ensuing state execution of the anarchists Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, and August Spies became the crucible in which Goldman’s radicalization and ongoing political self-education was forged. “I saw a new world opening before me,” she wrote then, and as she wrote in a 1910 essay, “Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive”—and it became her life’s work to spread the message of liberation far and wide.

It inspired her to leave her unhappy marriage and move to New York City at age 20, where she quickly became enmeshed in a community of Jewish radicals and other immigrant workers. There, she met Alexander Berkman, a fellow Lithuanian anarchist who would become her lifelong comrade and longtime romantic partner. While she was a big proponent of free love and enjoyed plenty of love affairs, for much of their lives, Goldman and Berkman were inseparable, their stories intertwined through times of peace, war, and a failed assassination attempt.

When Berkman landed in prison following the assassination attempt on industrialist Henry Clay Frick during the 1892 Homestead, PA steel strike, Goldman sent him letters; when he was freed in 1906, she welcomed him back with open arms. In 1919, during the first Red Scare, the politically motivated passage of the Immigration Act of 1918 led to the deportation of 249 anarchists, labor organizers, and other alleged political dissidents to the Soviet Union on a vessel that the press dubbed “the Soviet Ark;” Goldman and Berkman went together. During their stint in Communist Russia, the pair questioned Lenin himself about the repression of anarchists there and then fled the country together in 1921. Ultimately, they died four years apart, an ocean away from one another.

Goldman wasn’t as loud as some of her peers were about the use of violence and direct action, she had no problem advocating for its use when deemed necessary to achieve a greater goal. “Isn’t it stupid to be afraid of violence when you are in the midst of it all the time?” she asked the assembled crowd at a meeting in Harlem in 1909. “Anarchists don’t propagate violence. They only struggle against what already exists, and it is necessary to fight existing violence with violence. That is the only way that a new peace can dawn.”

Those words weren’t empty. In an effort to bring about a revolutionary workers’ uprising, she had helped Berkman plan the botched attentat (which Frick survived). She was falsely implicated in the assassination of President William McKinley by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz, who claimed her as an inspiration and was herself thrown in prison in 1893, for allegedly inciting a riot with a speech that urged her working-class female audience, “If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread.”