An Anarchist Queen and Her Radiant Protégé: Emma Goldman & Marie Tiboldo in Interwar Toronto

Feisty Women of Kensington Market – Part One

An Anarchist Queen and Her Radiant Protégé: Emma Goldman & Marie Tiboldo in Interwar Toronto

A public talk with Prof. Franca Iacovetta and Prof. Cynthia Wright

Saturday, May 2, 2026, 2:00 pm (doors open 1:45)
Lillian H. Smith Library, 239 College Street at Huron

FREE ADMISSION

This talk draws on our ongoing research into Emma Goldman’s (1869-1940) interwar Toronto exile as a case study for investigating how she has been remembered inter-generationally in the city’s official and popular memory. A wide range of people have invoked Goldman in various ways – from the anarchist comrades who long outlived her to second-wave feminists, cultural producers, and punk music youth associated with Kensington Market’s anarchist space, Who’s Emma? (1996-2001). But Goldman’s fame has often obscured the lives of her lesser-known comrades, especially the women.

We focus on Goldman’s encounter with Marie Tiboldo (1904-2008), a long-lived Italian Canadian anarchist garment worker largely unknown even to Goldman Specialists, and ask about her role in the work of creating a memory of Goldman for subsequent generations to inherit.

FRANCA IACOVETTA is Professor Emerita, University of Toronto, and co-editor of Studies in Gender and History at University of Toronto Press. An historian of Canadian and transnational women’s migration, labour, and radical history, she has published a dozen books.

CYNTHIA WRIGHT is Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at York University. Trained as an historian, her interdisciplinary research interests and publications have been shaped by Toronto’s many transnational radical movements and social struggles.

This talk is presented by the Kensington Market Historical Society, in collaboration with the Toronto Public Library and the Canadian Studies Program at University College, U of T.