Emma Goldman and the Power of the Individual
Sunday, March 4, 2012
3:00 PM
Concord Academy Chapel
J. Edgar Hoover called Emma Goldman “the most dangerous woman in America” and got her deported; a 60’s feminist would call her “a role model, an inspiration” in a world of “enforced domesticity.” And the Yale University Press calls Vivian Gornick’s book on her “the story of a modern radical who took seriously the idea that inner liberation is the first business of social revolution.” Having icons like Thoreau and Emerson, Goldman’s journey is one that can inform our own thinking in dealing with such difficult issues as environmental abuse, economic inequality, and foreign intervention.
Vivian Gornick will be the first speaker for Thoreau Farm Forum on Sunday, March 4, at 3:00 PM to discuss her book, Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life. This Forum will take place at Concord Academy.
Emma Goldman (1869 – 1940) became a world-famous symbol for the spirit of resistance to the power of institutional authority over the individual. Her passion and magnetic language moved thousands who flocked to her lectures. One of her major influences was Henry David Thoreau. Goldman, Gornick writes, had a passion for the work of American dissenters like Thoreau and Walt Whitman “whose romantic defense of the supremacy of the individual spoke even more directly to her own emotional imagination; it was out of the language of the homegrown American rebel that her anarchism found its great expressiveness and defiant originality.”
Vivian Gornick is a critic, memoirist, essayist and the author of, among other books, the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments and three essay collections: The End of the Novel of Love, Approaching Eye Level, and most recently, The Men in My Life. She writes often about reading and writing. In addition to the Emma Goldman biography, Gornick has also written about Elizabeth Cady Stanton in, The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom Gornick casts as “the greatest feminist thinker of the nineteenth century.” Gornick lives in New York.
This event is FREE. But space is limited. Let us know you’re coming by sending an e-mail to: info@thoreaufarm.org or call 978-451-0300.