missvoltairine:

faerytalemalice:

History crush: cool people from Michigan edition!

Voltairine de Cleyre was basically really cool. Really really cool. To blatantly copy her Wikipedia article:

Voltairine de Cleyre (November 17, 1866 – June 20, 1912) was an American anarchist writer and feminist. She was a prolific writer and speaker, opposing the state, marriage, and the domination of religion in sexuality and women’s lives. She began her activist career in the freethought movement. De Cleyre was initially drawn to individualist anarchism but evolved through mutualism to an “anarchism without adjectives.” She believed that any system was acceptable as long as it did not involve force. However, according to anarchist author Iain McKay, she embraced the ideals of stateless communism.[…]

Born in the small town of Leslie, Michigan, she was placed as a teenager into a Catholic convent in Sarnia, Ontario by her father, because he thought it would give her a better education. This experience had the effect of moving her towards atheism rather than Christianity. Of her time spent there she said, “it had been like the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and there are white scars on my soul, where ignorance and superstition burnt me with their hell fire in those stifling days”.^[2] She attempted to run away by swimming to Port Huron, Michigan, and hiking 17 miles; but she met friends of her family who contacted her father and sent her back. She graduated and received a gold medal from the school, which she can be seen wearing in the picture.

Family ties to the Abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad, the harsh and unrelenting poverty that she grew up in, and being named after the philosopher Voltaire all contributed to the radical rhetoric that she developed shortly after adolescence. After schooling in the convent, de Cleyre began her intellectual involvement in the strongly anti-clerical freethought movement by lecturing and contributing articles to freethought periodicals.

Sigh. Even though I’m sort of torn on anarchy (after once thinking it was the most fab thing ever) she’s still pretty cool.

Guys. I want you to read that wikipedia article and take some serious time to reflect on how deeply badass Voltairine de Cleyre was. She swam from Sarnia to Port Huron and then hiked for 17 miles to get away from being forced into a conservative religious education. Are you that hardcore? No, you’re not.

Voltairine de Cleyre: more hardcore than you. FOREVER. Respect.