In this context, I guess it fits.

This month's date tie-in is a commemoration of the birthday of Emma Goldman. Though in some of the circles I frequent Emma Goldman remains (almost seventy years after her death) an icon, and perhaps even a hero, my guess is that most people, upon hearing her name, would ask "Emma who?". And that's totally legitimate - after all, lots of people don't really read T-shirts.

But even if she's an icon, or at least a forgotten one, does Emma Goldman's birthday really merit a date tie-in here? The obvious answer to that question would be that I can tie-in whatever I want, but something a bit more Boidem related seems called for, and of course with a bit of squirming and maneuvering, I really can find something.

This month's column deals with what I suppose should be called "the joys of clicking", so perhaps it's only fair that I offer at least an example or two. So .... I actually have Emma Goldman's autobiography, Living My Life, on my shelf (or perhaps presently in a box). I've even read it. But as is undoubtedly true about most of us, my primary contact with her is through my almost worn-out T-shirt that sports a photograph of Goldman along with the quote:

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution

I like that shirt, though I've always doubted that she actually said those words. And anyway, surely it was enough to feel that they were in the proper Goldman spirit in order to make them "accurate" enough to wear a T-shirt that proclaimed them.

While preparing this column, however, since I'd already determined that my posting date would be Goldman's birthday, I figured that it was only fair to click around and perhaps find, once and for all, just how accurate the quote really is. Getting a definitive answer was considerably easier than I expected (though of course once you start clicking, even after getting an answer to what you wanted to learn, it's hard to stop). It turns out that back in 1991, Alix Kates Shulman wrote an article, Dances with Feminists, (reprinted, of course, on the web) devoted to the question of whether or not Goldman said those, or similar, words, and how they became iconized. It's a good read.

Go to: and that, and that, oh, and that ...