Writing, as we know, can be a scandalous art. Depending on the country and the culture in which it takes place, it can also be criminal. Numerous lists abound of famous authors who have gone to prison, and most can probably name a few pretty quickly — Miguel de Cervantes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Antonio Gramsci, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Oscar Wilde, for instance, have all spent time behind bars.
However, though it's easy to think of many male authors who spent time in prison, female authors seldom come to mind. While lesser known than their male counterparts, many women writers were imprisoned for speaking up for their beliefs. Read on for a list of six women writers who have spent time in prison — considering their stories, you'll wonder why they aren't discussed more often.
Meet the woman who attempted to murder a factory manager, allegedly influenced a president's assassination, and was a staunch advocate for women's and workers' rights. A Lithuanian immigrant who moved to the U.S. with her family in 1885, Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was one of the most well-known and outspoken anarchists of her time, and considered one of the most dangerous.
Her speeches on freedom of expression, workers' rights, and capitalist oppression regularly drew crowds of thousands and often landed her in trouble. She was sent to jail several times for "inciting to riot." In 1917, she was sentenced to two years in prison for urging men not to sign up for the draft, and was deported soon after her release. Though she fell into obscurity after her death, Goldman's fame was renewed by feminists and anarchist scholars in the 1970s. The popular saying "If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution," is attributed to Goldman, though it is, in fact, an abridgment of a longer passage in her biography.
During her three months in prison, she wrote Memoirs from the Women's Prison on a roll of toilet paper using a smuggled eyebrow pencil. Though she was forced to flee Egypt in 1993 after receiving death threats from religious groups, this hasn't deterred her from continuing to criticize female circumcision — a process she had undergone herself as a child — and writing over 50 books of fiction and nonfiction.
That would have been the case if you were studying at U.C. Santa Cruz in the 1990s, and Davis was your professor. A radical feminist and a leading member of the Communist Party USA, Davis was a prominent national figure and civil rights activist in the 1960s who often encountered heavy resistance to her political views. In 1969, she was dismissed from her teaching position at UCLA's philosophy department for her membership in the Communist Party, and for using "inflammatory language" in her lectures.
In 1971, Davis was issued an arrest warrant for purchasing the firearms that 17-year-old Jonathan Jackson later used to take control of a courtroom, leading to the deaths of four men, including a judge. She spent months in hiding before she was arrested. Davis spent close to a year in jail and was eventually exonerated at trial. She continues to be an influential activist and lecturer.