concluded that perhaps the anarchists "hated authority because authority as they had known it had been neither kind nor just to them." Describing Goldman as a "vanishing" species motivated to radicalism out of pure humanity, Duffus described Living My Life as "one of the great books of its kind." In an anonymous "Letter to the Editor" published in The Washington Post, a writer compared Goldman's criticism of the Soviet Union to John Dewey's philosophy that "violence begets violence". They agreed with her insistence that progress could not be achieved through dictatorship. Some anarchists tried to settle personal issues. Helene Minkin, her former roommate and an anarchist in her own right, quickly published her memoirs in a serialized format in the Jewish daily newspaper Forverts (The Forward) in 1932. She wanted to defend her husband Johann Most, whom she had married in the 1890s, from Goldman's scathing criticism. Minkin rejected Goldman's statement that Most broke with Goldman and married Minkin because he wanted a wife who would take a domestic role. Minkin said she did not know the reason for the break between the two former friends (Most was originally a mentor to Goldman), but she said that her personal relationship with Most was neither subordinate nor traditional. Minkin described her role this way: "Most, as I have noted once already, had the right to desire a little happiness for himself in the midst of his bitter and turbulent struggle… It would often bother me when I saw that Most wobbled a bit on his pedestal, and I supported him so that he wouldn’t be pushed down from his heights." Significance Living My Life provides critical insight as to the mentality of radical immigrants in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Goldman personally explores the often neglected topics of political violence and the nature of human sexuality in the early anarchist movement. At the beginning of Goldman's autobiography, the Haymarket bombing was a recent memory and American anarchists had already been tied to notions of violence and assassination. As historian John Higham posits, after Haymarket, the immigrant was widely stereotyped by American nativists as "a lawless creature given over to violence and disorder." Goldman's early narrative emphasizes the violent tendencies of the movement, as it was only a few years following her arrival in New York City that she and Berkman attempted to assassinate Henry Frick.