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, “Kristofer Hansteen” (1906)
“OF the earth, unearthly—” The sentence remained unfinished as I had written it two years and a half ago when Disease laid its hand on me, and all my MSS. ended in a dash. It was a description of Kristofer Hansteen, an explanation of his work in Norway. And now that I am ready to pick up the thread of life again, I read that he is dead—of the earth no more, he who hardly ever belonged to it. At this moment the most insistent memory I have of that delicate, half-aërial personality are the words: “When the doctors told […]
The Sex Question
Voltairine de Cleyre, “Relation of Sex in Humanity” (1894)
[two_third] RELATION OF SEX IN HUMANITY. By Voltairine de Cleyre. A Lecture Delivered before the Ladies Liberal League, Philadelphia, Pa., Dec. 12, ’93, in Reply to Professor Cope. Before proceeding to state my own position on the subject of the relation of sex, I will very briefly restate the principal points of Professor Cope’s argument. He viewed the question from the two standpoints of biology and sociology, beginning with the former which, he declared, furnishes the foundation facts from which sociological conclusions are to be drawn. And having done so, arrived at the conclusion that the natural position of woman […]
fiction
Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Sorrows of the Body”
I have never wanted anything more than the wild creatures have,—a broad waft of clean air, a day to lie on the grass at times, with nothing to do but slip the blades through my fingers, and look as long as I pleased at the whole blue arch, and the screens of green and white between; leave for a month to float and float along the salt crests and among the foam, or roll with my naked skin over a clean long stretch of sunshiny sand; food that I liked, straight from the cool ground, and time to taste its […]