While there is no shortage of editions of Voltairine de Cleyre’s writings, I’ve put together a collection which includes those I use most often, or recommend most often to others. The “basic writings” pamphlet includes “Anarchism and American Traditions,” “The Economic Tendency of Freethought,” and the two essays relating to individualism and communism. Invisible Molotov also has much of this material, in more confrontational packaging. Pick the package that fits your audience.
The Sex Question
Voltairine de Cleyre, “Events are the True Schoolmasters” (1907)
I count it as one of the best fortunes of my life that in my early days as an anarchist it was my privilege to know Dyer D. Lum. These thirteen years he is in his grave, and yet whenever editors and contributors of anarchist journals fall to denouncing the actions of the unwise, the ebullitions of the mass, I hear his voice, as yesterday, saying in his short, brusque way: “Events are the true schoolmasters.” There was in his day, as there is now, a certain percentage of propagandists who think that they possess the truth, the whole truth, […]
The Sex Question
Voltairine de Cleyre, “They Who Marry Do Ill” (1908)
THEY WHO MARRY DO ILL By VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE. (A lecture presenting the negative side of the question, whose positive was argued under the heading “They Who Marry Do Well,” by Dr. Henrietta P. Westbrook; both lectures delivered before the Radical Liberal League, Philadelphia, April 28, 1907.) LET me make myself understood on two points, now, so that when discussion arises later, words may not be wasted in considering things not in question: First—How shall we measure doing well or doing ill; Second—What I mean by marriage. So much as T have been able to put together the pieces of […]
Anarchist Beginnings
Voltairine de Cleyre, “Anarchism” (1901)
THERE are two spirits abroad in the world,—the spirit of Caution, the spirit of Dare, the spirit of Quiescence, the spirit of Unrest; the spirit of Immobility, the spirit of Change; the spirit of Hold-fast-to-that-which-you-have, the spirit of Let-go-and-fly-to-that-which-you-have-not; the spirit of the slow and steady builder, careful of its labors, loath to part with any of its achievements, wishful to keep, and unable to discriminate between what is worth keeping and what is better cast aside, and the spirit of the inspirational destroyer, fertile in creative fancies, volatile, careless in its luxuriance of effort, inclined to cast away the […]