Sponsored by The Grolier Club
Join Curator Eve Kahn for a pre-recorded virtual tour of “Zoe Anderson Norris, Queen of Bohemia,” followed by a live Q&A.
“To Fight for the Poor with My Pen: Zoe Anderson Norris, Queen of Bohemia,” runs in the 2nd-floor gallery of The Grolier Club through May 13, 2023. Norris (1860-1914) – dubbed by Eve “the Nellie Bly you’ve never heard of” – was a Kentucky belle turned restless Kansas housewife turned “Queen of Bohemia,” living with and reporting on some of New York City’s most vulnerable populations, including immigrants, sex workers, and the poor in general, and running her own bimonthly magazine, “The East Side” (1909-1914) to help her document poverty, incompetence and corruption. Eve is working on the first biography of Norris, and the exhibit draws on about 100 objects from her collection, shedding light on how Norris – a forerunner of today’s social-justice advocates and confessional bloggers – mined raw material from her childhood and youth, her two bad marriages, and her own feelings of being an outsider. Eve’s lecture will draw on her collection materials on view in the Grolier exhibition, which includes the only complete run of “The East Side” known to survive in private hands, as well as Norris’s novels and dozens of periodicals featuring her work alongside illustrations by major Gilded Age artists. Eve has also collected artifacts from Norris’s youth in Kentucky and Kansas, publications by her contemporaries (such as fellow reformer Emma Goldman), and Ragged Edge Klub members’ sheet music and souvenir postcards). She will discuss Norris’s coverage of issues that still resonate today – corruption, harassment, sexual assault and trafficking.