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Initially de Cleyre sided with Tucker's individualists against the anti-propertarian anarchists. Contrasting herself with Emma Goldman, a communist anarchist who looked to Bakunin and Kropotkin as adepts, she wrote:
Miss Goldman is a communist; I am an individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property, I wish to assert it. I make my war upon privilege and authority, whereby the right of property, the true right in that which is proper to the individual, is annihilated. She believes that co-operation would entirely supplant competition; I hold that competition in one form or another will always exist, and that it is highly desirable it should. But whether she or I be right, or both of us be wrong, of one thing I am sure; the spirit which animates Emma Goldman is the only one which will emancipate the slave from his slavery, the tyrant from his tyranny - the spirit which is willing to dare and suffer. - Voltairine de Cleyre, In Defense Of Emma Goldman (1894)
Note Voltairine's tolerance, even while she disagrees. Later in life, de Cleyre would become an "anarchist without adjectives," hoping to focus all anarchists on the core anti-statism, rather than getting caught up in the schisms of economic sectarianism.
Socialism and Communism both demand a degree of joint effort and administration which would beget more regulation than is wholly consistent with ideal Anarchism; Individualism and Mutualism, resting upon property, involve a development of the private policeman not at all compatible with my notion of freedom. ... I no longer label myself otherwise than as 'Anarchist' simply. - Voltairine de Cleyre, The Making of an Anarchist
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