Top Ten 21. A Dangerous Woman the graphic biography of Emma Goldman by Sharon Rudahl. New York: The New Press 2007.

ISBN 9781595580641

The revolutionary activist, speaker, writer, and feminist’s is captured in a graphic novel that tells the life of the famous woman who was committed to the fight of the oppressed.

Media: Pen and ink with watercolor.

5Q/4P

Curriculum Connection

Lesson Title Emma Goldman and American Freedom of Speech

Grade level 10th grade curriculum. World History, Culture, and Geography: The Modern World

Unit Theme Topic

Recent educational reforms encourage classroom use of primary sources as the best way to present opposing points of view. Issues of the period are experienced through newspaper accounts, political cartoons, speeches, pamphlets, and autobiographical narratives rather than through synthesized historical texts.

CA Academic Standards Addressed Students in grade ten study major turning points that shaped the modern world, from the late eighteenth century through the present.

10-3 Students analyze the effects of the Industrial Revolution in England, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States. 4. Trace the evolution of work and labor, including the demise of the slave trade and the effects of immigration, mining and manufacturing, division of labor, and the union movement.

10.5 Students analyze the causes and course of the First World War. Analyze the arguments for entering into war presented by leaders from all sides of the Great War and the role of political and economic rivalries, ethnic and ideological conflicts, domestic discontent and disorder, and propaganda and nationalism in mobilizing the civilian population in support of “total war.”

Materials used The lesson plan will include use of the text of the graphic novel Dangerous Woman: the graphic biography of Emma Goldman by Sharon Rudahl.

Primary sources of Emma Goldman’s life and times.

Students will take an active part in the lesson plan by including an art project based of primary sources of Emma Goldman’s life and times. They will create a magazine similar to Mother Earth the paper that she founded using copies of primary sources and Xeroxed pages of our book.

Expected student outcomes. School texts often ignore Goldman and other challenging voices, or only briefly mention them. This absence of an historical record of controversy in the curriculum not only denies students access to a full range of ideas, but ultimately limits their ability to understand and analyze the past. The lesson will last for one week and will include learning about the beginnings of:

Day One

First Amendment rights--Legislative restraints against individual expression and privacy, free speech campaigns, free speech organizations, vigilante violence, legal challenges defining the right to dissent, analysis of federal vs. state and local authorities' jurisdiction over First Amendment rights.

Labor--Factory conditions, labor unrest, violence against strikers, the Industrial Workers of the World, syndicalism, organizing for the eight-hour work day.

Day 2

Progressive Politics--Definition and appeal of anarchism, McKinley assassination, similarities and differences between reformers, socialists, anarchists, communists, and liberal progressives.

Day Three

Red Scare--Government investigation of radicals and raids of their offices and organizations, arrests and deportation, particular vulnerability of aliens to political repression

Rise of industrialism--Conditions of industrial workers, workers in conflict with industrial capitalists, impact of women entering the labor force, industrial unionism

Day Four

Immigration--Motives for immigration; immigrants' aspirations and expectations; the realities of working life for immigrants

Women's Rights--Critique of suffrage, women's liberation, birth control movement, motherhood and rearing of children, free love, sexuality, domestic inequality, discrimination in the workplace

Day Five

World War I--Resistance to President Wilson's "preparedness" program, anti-conscription, conscientious objectors, economic analysis of the war effort, repression of dissent

Yellow Journalism--News coverage, political cartoons, identifying bias, popular fears of anarchism and women.

On each of the days students will Xerox pages from the book and from the primary sources gathered that apply to the days subjects. They will use a collage style for creating their newspaper and can add headlines and art that they create for their Mother Earth magazine.

Closure Find out what your students learned by having them discuss their newspapers and display it for the class to see. Everyone can walk around and look at other students ideas also. Also important to me would be what they learned about free speech and if they could see any signs of people today being jailed or harassed by not supporting the war in the Middle East. I as a teacher would add pictures and articles on modern day dissidents and how they are being watched and portrayed by the media and treated by our government. If Emma was alive today do you think she would support the war? What rallies would she be attending?

D. Guhl Summer 2009