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If, on the other hand, the tendency of invention to simplify, enabling the advantages of machinery to be combined with smaller aggregations of workers, shall also follow its own logic, the great manufacturing plants will break up, population will go after the fragments, and there will be seen not indeed the hard, self-sustaining, isolated pioneer communities of early America, but thousands of small communities stretching along the lines of transportation, each producing very largely for its own needs, able to rely upon itself, and therefore able to be independent. For the same rule holds good for societies as for individuals - those may be free who are able to make their own living. - Voltairine de Cleyre, Anarchism & American Traditions
Voltairine de Cleyre considered the main problems with America to be:
- state intervention in commerce
- state-controlled education
- military interventionism
- growth of state debt and government offices
- a failed judiciary
- overly centralized and interdependent communities
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About the growing statism of the United States, her conclusion was devastating, and her explanation for the slide into authoritarianism incontrovertible.
And now, what has Anarchism to say to all this, this bankruptcy of republicanism, this modern empire that has grown up on the ruins of our early freedom? We say this, that the sin our fathers sinned was that they did not trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to compromise between liberty and government, believing the latter to be "a necessary evil," and the moment the compromise was made, the whole misbegotten monster of our present tyranny began to grow. Instruments which are set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with which the free are struck. - Voltairine de Cleyre, Anarchism & American Traditions
De Cleyre was perhaps the first anarcha-feminist, intensely concerned with asserting full individual rights for woman. This was no doubt shocking at a time when women could not own property, and were legally chattel of their husbands. She wrote and lectured in support of Moses Harman, a hero of individualist feminism. Harman was imprisoned under the Comstock laws for publishing birth control information and discussing sexual issues in his anarchist periodical "Lucifer, the Light Bearer." Here is Voltairine's cutting commentary of the obscenity charges and Harman's tormentors.
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