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Letter to Judge Henry R. Selden
Judge Henry R. Selden had advised Susan B. Anthony that she had the right to vote. When she was subsequently arrested for voting, Selden represented her in court. In this letter, Anthony urges him to send the text of his argument so that it could be published in time for the upcoming National Woman Suffrage Association convention. She wrote the postscript to the letter on a flyer for a mass meeting of the New York Woman’s Suffrage Society. The collection includes Judge Selden’s own copy of the final printed version of his argument. -
[Portrait of Martha Maxwell from “Mrs. M.A. Maxwell’s Rocky Mountain Series”]
Naturalist Martha Maxwell brought Western fauna into public view through her skills at taxidermy. She defined the art of creating natural history dioramas with animals displayed in their natural habitats. An aspiring scientist, she left Oberlin College for lack of money and journeyed west to join the Gold Rush. Maxwell corresponded with the Secretary of the Smithsonian, Spencer Fullerton Baird, sending him bird specimens. Today a few of those specimens survive and are the only examples of her work and evidence of her two Rocky Mountain Museums in Denver and Boulder, Colorado. In 1877, a subspecies of the Eastern Screech Owl, Megascops asio maxwelliae, was named in her honor. To support her work and her family, Maxwell established a museum and charged admission. Her Rocky Mountain Museum first opened in Boulder in 1874 and moved to Denver the following year. Maxwell was invited to show her work in the Colorado Building at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. Her display was one of the most popular at the internationally attended event. So many people asked whether the displays could have been done by a woman that she put up a sign reading “Woman’s Work.” Maxwell shot, trapped, and prepared all her own specimens, noting that “The world demands proof of woman’s capabilities.” -
[Portrait of Emily Faithfull]
English publisher and printer Emily Faithfull dedicated her career to fighting for women’s right to work. She wrote extensively on the issue and established the Victoria Press for the Employment of Women in 1860. The Press and its goal of women’s employment in the printing trade was a controversial labor and class issue at the time. The Press’s early business was contract printing for organizations aligned with its mission like the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women. Faithfull traveled extensively in America, publishing her book, Three Visits to America, documenting her observations of working women throughout the United States. -
[Portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe]
Harriet Beecher Stowe rocketed to celebrity with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), selling 300,000 copies during its first year in print. -
The Revolution
The Revolution (1868–1872) was the first weekly newspaper devoted to women’s rights. Founded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton as the official publication of the National Woman Suffrage Association, The Revolution helped bring national attention back to the women’s rights movement in the aftermath of the Civil War. The paper’s circulation was modest, but its impact was broad. It was an important part of the NWSA’s efforts to attract working-class women, using columns on unionization, discrimination against female workers, and other pertinent topics to attract and hold their interest. The collection holds the most complete run of this groundbreaking publication. -
Te Deum Laudamus
The medieval-inspired illuminations by printer Emily Faithfull’s sister Esther Faithfull Fleet are dazzling. This is one of two books published by Faithfull’s Victoria Press that are printed using chromolithography. Both are illuminated by Fleet. The other, 38 Texts, is also in the collection. The Victoria Press maintained a reputation for excellent work, and Faithfull was appointed Printer and Publisher in Ordinary to the Queen. Te Deum Laudamus was dedicated to Queen Victoria, with her permission. -
Madame Restell’s Mansion on Fifth Avenue [stereoview]
English immigrant Anna Trow Lohman, known as Madame Restell, became notorious and financially successful by performing abortions. New York had outlawed abortion unless necessary to save the mother’s life, but abortion practitioners continued to work in the state. Restell was entrepreneurial. She sold patent medicines for birth control and abortion, provided housing for pregnant women, and facilitated adoptions. In 1847, her husband, the radical printer Charles M. Lohman, published a medical companion under the name A. M. Mauriceau. It went through at least nine editions. The book advertised Restell’s patent medicines, as well as condoms. Their business flourished, with branches opening in Philadelphia and Boston, they and were able to purchase a mansion on Fifth Avenue. In 1873, the Comstock Law to suppress the circulation of obscene materials was enacted, and in 1878 Restell was personally arrested by Anthony Comstock. Anna Restell committed suicide the morning she was to face charges in court. -
I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance [cabinet card]
Feminist and abolitionist Sojourner Truth was one of the towering figures of nineteenth-century America. She was born into slavery in 1797 on a rural farm in Ulster County, New York. At age thirty, she drew strength from her Christian faith and found the courage to escape with her infant daughter. By the 1860s, Sojourner Truth had moved to Battle Creek, Michigan. Between 1863 and 1875, Truth had at least fourteen different photographic portraits made. She sold them to provide income for herself. These cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards were portable and far cheaper to produce than copies of her Narrative. She controlled every aspect of the way she is depicted in these images—genteelly, in cap and shawl, often with her knitting, a book or photograph in her lap, obscuring her disabled right hand. -
The Gospel of Slavery: A Primer of Freedom
This illustrated juvenile alphabet book by Unitarian minister Abel Thomas is unsparing in its depiction of slavery. It includes an image and verse for each letter, with prose lines written in response to the defenders of slavery. “W stands for woman,” and the explicatory prose below the verse speaks to the selling of children from their mothers. The Gospel of Slavery is one of only two anti-slavery alphabets published during the antebellum period. The other, The Anti-Slavery Alphabet by Hannah Townsend (1847), is also in the collection. This copy is in its original wrappers. -
[Portrait of Lucretia Mott]
Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were delegates to the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Female delegates were not allowed to participate in the convention and were relegated to the balcony. Some male delegates, including William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, sat with them in solidarity. After the convention, Stanton and Mott began to lay the groundwork for the first women’s rights convention, which took place in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. -
[Coal barons at the Savage Mine, Virginia City, Nevada]
Marie-Louise (Louise) Hungerford Bryant Mackey and Theresa Rooney Fair were among the few to find fortune in the Virginia City, Nevada, mining settlement. Both women came from humble circumstances. Theresa Rooney was the daughter of Irish immigrants and married Irish immigrant James Fair. Louise Bryant, after the death of her first husband, supported herself and her children by working as a seamstress and teaching French at the Daughters of Charity convent school. She was almost destitute when she met and married Irishman John W. Mackey in the 1860s. In 1867, the Mackeys and Fairs literally struck gold when their company discovered the biggest bonanza in the famed Comstock Lode. The Mackeys were generous patrons to the local Catholic parish and convent. Louise donated the land for the Daughters of Charity hospital. Theresa Fair also made the Daughters of Charity hospital her most important philanthropy. -
The Slave’s Appeal
On the eve of the Civil War, Elizabeth Cady Stanton published The Slave’s Appeal, in which she applied the Ten Commandments to the institution of slavery and exhorted New Yorkers to defy the Fugitive Slave Act. The Slave’s Appeal included petitions to be circulated so that the signatures collected could be sent to state legislatures to demand an end to slave hunting. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony would later oppose the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted suffrage to black men, because it did not enfranchise women. -
Legends of North Wales and Reminiscenes of a Short Visit to the Vale of Llangollen
In the late eighteenth century, aristocrat Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the young orphaned daughter of Chambre Brabazon Ponsonby, abandoned their lives in Ireland and made a home for themselves in Llangollen, Wales, to the disapproval of both their families. Known as the Ladies of Llangollen, they appeared to have understood their relationship as a marriage. They were part of an emerging culture of relationships between same-sex couples. While they lived a life of rural retreat, the Ladies’ celebrity and social status meant that their home Plas Newydd became a salon. They built an extensive library, and there they hosted many of the intelligensia of the day, including poets such as Wordsworth, Byron, and Anna Seward; physician Erasmus Darwin; potter Josiah Wedgwood; and the reigning Queen Charlotte. In the nineteenth century there was a thriving industry producing and selling objects commemorating the Ladies of Llangollen. -
Our Nig; or, Sketches from the life of a free Black: in a two-story white house, North, showing that slavery's shadows fall even there
Our Nig is the first novel written by an African American and published in the United States. Wilson wrote it to raise funds to care for her sick son George and published it anonymously. The story recounts the oppression of free blacks as indentured servants in the north. Wilson herself had been indentured until the age of eighteen as a house servant. Our Nig was the only novel she wrote. Later in life, she was active in the spiritualist community as a medium.Tags 1800s -
Telescope teachings: a familiar sketch of astronomical discovery: combining a special notice of objects coming within the range of a small telescope, illustrated by the author's original drawings: with a detail of the most interesting discoveries which have been made with the assistance of powerful telescopes, concerning the phenomena of the heavenly bodies, including the recent comet
Irish naturalist and artist Mary Ward wrote and illustrated bestselling books on astronomy, microscopy, and entomology. Her exceptional illustrations were admired by some of the leading male scientists of the day, who helped her gain access to equipment and commissioned her to illustrate their publications. She made time for her scholarly work after her children were in bed. Her publications provided critical income for the family. Telescope Teachings includes Ward’s detailed description of Donati’s Comet. -
An Introductory Lecture to a Course on Physiology, will be Delivered by Mary J. Scarlett, M.D.
Quaker Mary J. Scarlett graduated from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1857 and became Professor of Anatomy at the College in 1862. She practiced amongst the poor and gave lectures on hygiene and health in rural communities. Because hospitals at this time were not open to women for purposes of instruction, the Woman’s Medical College opened the Woman’s Hospital of Philadelphia in 1861. Scarlett served as resident physician at the hospital until 1871. -
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands
Nurse and businesswoman Mary Seacole was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1805 to a Scottish officer in the British Army and a free Jamaican woman. In Seacole’s autobiographical Wonderful Adventures, she relates her extensive travel and medical contributions, including her work as a nurse during the Crimean War. She had applied to participate in wartime initiatives, including joining a group of nurses organized by Florence Nightingale, but was rejected. Instead, she and a business partner gathered their own supplies, booked passage on a Dutch ship, and established quarters for sick officers between Balaclava and Sevastopol. -
Woman's Rights Commensurate with Her Capacities and Obligations: A Series of Tracts
This volume gathers together important speeches and essays from the early women’s rights movement in the United States. Most of the texts were read at Women’s Rights Conventions in Worcester (1850) or Syracuse (1852). Contents include the Declaration of Sentiments from Seneca Falls, and speeches by important leaders in the movement such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Angelina Grimke, and Paulina Davis. This copy has evidence of women’s ownership, with a small inscription on the first page, “Miss Diana James Book.” -
Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828
Feminist and abolitionist Sojourner Truth was one of the towering figures of nineteenth-century America. She was born into slavery in 1797 on a rural farm in Ulster County, New York. At age thirty, she drew strength from her Christian faith and found the courage to escape with her infant daughter. A spiritualist, in 1843 she had a vision and changed her name from Isabella Baumfree to Sojourner Truth. She became a preacher, earning her living as she moved through Long Island and Connecticut, eventually joining a Garrisonian, abolitionist, utopian community, the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Massachusetts. In 1850, noting the success of Frederick Douglass’ autobiography, Truth dictated her life story to her friend Olive Gilbert, who was a fellow member of the Northampton Association. Truth wrote, published, and distributed the book herself. She used the proceeds to support herself and to buy a house of her own in Northampton. -
Manuscript blurb for Sojourner Truth’s Narrative
Harriet Beecher Stowe rocketed to celebrity with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), selling 300,000 copies during its first year in print. Abolititionist and feminist Sojourner Truth saw an opportunity. Truth asked Stowe to write a promotional statement that would bring notice to her autobiographical Narrative. She and Stowe met for the first and only time in 1853. This signed statement appears as an introduction in some copies of the 1853 edition of the Narrative.
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