Portrait of a Revolutionary: Emma Goldman for Young Readers

As a teen-ager I was fascinated by the idea of biographies. I longed to discover what other people's lives were really like. I wondered about what they felt, who they loved and hated, what they ate and wore. But I distinctly remember finding, instead, a series of facts, a kind of record of achievements. Certainly there was little story-telling. When the crucial turning points in a character's life were presented, they were done so from the outside, so that if they reverberated for the character, they never did for me. There was little drama and no real sense of character. The portraits were skeletal and laudatory. I felt sure, as I tucked myself into bed night after night with novels, that I could never find the kind of character, description, suspense in stories about real people's lives that I found in fiction. Probably there were exciting biographies that escaped me. But my overall impression has been confirmed by discussions with friends and students over the years.

If it was hard to find biographies of complex, full-bodied people, it certainly was rare to find ones of daring and challenging women. Madame Curie, Helen Keller, Florence Nightingale, St. Joan are the names that come to my mind, along with images of nurses, helpers, good though impared women, rather than fiery, powerful ones. However erroneous my impressions, they were created by the biographies I read. Even Joan of Arc, who was a real political leader, was so far away in time, space and temperament, and a saint too, that it seemed to me she could not possibly have been a real person. But America has produced many radical women who successfully challenged and changed the course of history, and who, until the rebirth of the feminist movement of the sixties, were unknown to me, though I came from a progressive home where politics was regularly discussed. If the names of Emma Goldman, Margeret Sanger, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mother Jones, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and many other activists were known to my parents and their friends, and if their part in American history was acknowledged and discussed, I must have assumed, along with the general run of girl children, that politcs was not for me. Boys/ men were to be the activists and I was to be a person of feeling.

Times have changed. In the sixties, in an attempt to bring these vital women and their stories closer to adolescents, Milton Meltzer edited the Women of America series, which was first published by Thomas Y. Crowell, and later some of these titles were picked up by Dell in paperback editions. The series reflected the heightened interest in women and their lives that was part of the sweeping liberal optimism of the times. But now I am told that even though much interest in women's lives survives (note the increasing number of women's autobiographies, biographies, journals, letters, and diaries published yearly), and despite informal reports from high school teachers that these books do well with teen-age girls, the series is in danger of going out of print. And none of the books is to be published this year in paperback. I am told they don't sell well and that libraries are hesitant to buy them for a number a reasons. This disturbs me. I know I could have used models of strong, daring women when I was a teen-ager, hopelessly fixated on boys. I needed to feel connected to a larger context than the inner world of my feelings and to believe there was a vital place for me in the outside world.

Certainly all adolescents need to understand that things do not exist in isolation—that people shape and are shaped by their times, and that politics is not merely an adult abstraction, but a way of life, a system of values, which they need to question as they grow into thinking adults. Young people need to begin to understand the complexity in things—in themselves, in the adults around them—the complexity of human feelings and of...