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Title details for The Solitude of Self by Vivian Gornick - Available

The Solitude of Self

Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton

by Vivian Gornick
Theresa Conkin
Audiobook
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Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the most important leaders of the movement to gain American women the vote. But, as Vivian Gornick argues in this passionate, vivid biographical essay, Stanton is also the greatest feminist thinker of the nineteenth century. Endowed with a philosophical cast of mind large enough to grasp the immensity that women's rights addressed, Stanton developed a devotion to equality uniquely American in character. Her writing and life make clear why feminism as a liberation movement has flourished here as nowhere else in the world.
Born in 1815 into a conservative family of privilege, Stanton was radicalized by her experience in the abolitionist movement. Attending the first international conference on slavery in London in 1840, she found herself amazed when the conference officials refused to seat her because of her sex. At that moment she realized that "In the eyes of the world I was not as I was in my own eyes, I was only a woman." At the same moment she saw what it meant for the American republic to have failed to deliver on its fundamental promise of equality for all. In her last public address, "The Solitude of Self," she argued for women's political equality on the grounds that loneliness is the human condition, and that each citizen therefore needs the tools to fight alone for his or her interests.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 6, 2021

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781705296134
      • File size: 136513 KB
      • Duration: 04:44:24

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from June 20, 2005
      Without the inimitable Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the voice of 19th-century feminists would have been much less forceful. Essayist and memoirist Gornick (Approaching Eye Level
      ) reflects on Stanton's (1815–1902) thought regarding the question of women's suffrage. Gornick anchors these rich ruminations on Stanton's final speech, vividly describing her subject, who, after some 40 years of striving for women's equality, focused on the vote as the
      critical right. She stood in front of her lifelong compatriots and enemies and argued that the inherent isolation of the human condition demands that people be allowed to be responsible for their own lives; thus, denying women the vote violates a basic human right to self-determination. Gornick explicates Stanton that "olitics is meant to mitigate the misery to which the human condition consigns us, not add to it." This revelation resonates as Gornick investigates the development of Stanton's engagement with the ideas affecting her world, the resistance those ideas met with, and the choices she made, which defined the future of "radical" feminism. Though Gornick considers her own awakening in the early 1970s, she rarely strays to the current state of feminism. However, her intriguing ideas leave the reader hoping for more thinking from her on the subject. Agent, Charlotte Sheedy.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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