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Am I Not a Woman and a Sister
The iconic figure of a bound captive woman is based on the 1787 Wedgwood Jasperware medallion Am I Not a Man and a Brother, made originally for Thomas Clarkson’s British Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. In 1837 the American Anti-Slavery Society commissioned Gibbs, Gardner and Company to strike a token commemorating the formation of the Liberty Party. An advertisement in the 27 November 1837 issue of The Emancipator announces the availability of the tokens for one dollar per hundred. The ad also notes plans to produce and sell a counterpart with a male figure. The U.S. Mint Director quickly shut down the circulation of the coin the same year. -
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. -
Manuscript receipt for “printing certificates of spirits, wines & teas imported in the first quarter of 1823”
Sister of two printers and married to another, Lydia Bailey was an experienced printer when she inherited a struggling shop upon the death of her husband in 1808. Industrious and enterprising, she printed for the Presbyterian church and numerous charitable organizations, including the Female Tract Society. From 1813 she was Printer to the City of Philadelphia, and master printer at one of the busiest printing shops in the city, employing over forty workers. The business printed almanacs, annual reports, bookseller catalogues, broadsides, and chapbooks. She was a printer for fifty-three years. -
Glorious Deeds of Women!
This broadside was likely written for Queen Caroline, wife to King George IV. In 1797, Princess Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel had married the Prince of Wales, who unbeknownst to her was already married to Mrs. Fitzherbert, his mistress. Caroline became a symbol of the oppression of women, a figure popular with her subjects who largely condemned her husband’s libertine behavior. -
Murder: Whereas Robert Smith, Late of Deptford, Shoe-maker, Stands Charged with the Murder of his Uncle, Mr. James Smith, of Lewisham [. . .]
Elizabeth Delahoy was a printer, binder, and stationer in Greenwich. Sadly, in 1808, a fire destroyed the shop she owned with her husband, taking his life. She carried on their business at least through 1824, while simultaneously running a boarding house and raising children. She printed typographically complex books alongside bread-and-butter job printing, such as this broadside. Delahoy advertises the speed with which she can print notices regarding crime or loss at her press. -
Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women
Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States. She immigrated with her family to the United States from England in 1831. Around 1844, she set her sights on becoming a physician, and endured years of rejections from medical schools until 1847 when a school in Geneva, New York, accepted her—in part as a joke. Blackwell, however, graduated first in her class. In 1853, she established a dispensary for the poor, the New York Infirmary for Women, which also became a training hospital for women. -
Memorial de l'art des accouchemens, ou, Principes fondés sur la pratique de l'Hospice de la maternité de Paris et sur celle des plus célèbres praticiens nationaux et étrangers : suivis, 1° des aphorismes de Mauriceau; 2° d'une série de 140 gravures représtant le mécanisme de toutes les espèces d'accouchemens : ouvrage placé, par décision ministérielle, au rang des livres classiques à l'usage des élèves de l'Ecole d'accouchemens de Paris...
French midwife Marie Boivin is considered one of the first great modern practitioners of obstetrics and gynecology. Boivin began her studies at a nunnery in Étampes and later worked under accomplished midwife Marie-Louise Lachapelle. She invented a new speculum and wrote numerous treatises, including Memorial de l’art des accouchemens, first published in 1812. This manual was published in many editions and translated into several European languages. Boivin also translated medical works from English and directed numerous hospitals throughout her career. -
[Flowers]
The collection contains a significant gathering of materials written by and relating to Charlotte, Ann, and Emily Brontë. Charlotte used the newly fashionable style of embroidery known as “Berlin woolwork” to create this needlework in wool yarn on canvas. The style was being promoted at a time when a greater number of women had leisure time that might be devoted to decorative needlework. The single sheet patterns were inexpensive and easy to translate to the canvas. The design relates to a watercolor by Charlotte Brontë, circa 1831–1832, now in the Brontë Parsonage Museum. -
Letter to Ellen Nussey
Charlotte Brontë begins this letter to her lifelong friend with an update on her efforts to secure work as a governess. She goes on to relate a visit from the wife of a curate whose husband ruined their family through his drinking and “treated her and her child savagely.” Brontë attests to her own distaste for the curate even before she knew about his abusive character. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell quotes this section of the letter in her biography of Brontë, noting that it “shows her instinctive aversion to a particular class of men, whose vices some have supposed she looked upon with indulgence.” -
The Fairy-land of Science
In 1864 at age twenty-four, Arabella Buckley became the secretary for geologist Charles Lyell. From this position she gained connections to other important Victorian-era scientists such as Alfred Wallace, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Huxley. Upon Lyell’s death in 1875, she pursued her own career writing popular scientific works, including many for children. She wrote over ten books on science, some published in multiple editions and translated into other languages. Her publishing success was due to her ability to describe major scientific ideas with rich literary imagery, as in Fairy-land of Science. -
An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans
Lydia Maria Child was one of the most influential writers and reformers in the nineteenth century. Her first novel, Hobomok, about an interracial marriage between a white woman and a Native American, shocked reviewers but was extremely successful. Her Frugal Housewife was the first American cookery book written for a non-aristocratic readership. She published the first juvenile magazine in America and edited the National Anti-Slavery Standard. When she published An Appeal, her literary standing and her income both dropped sharply. Her comprehensive scholarly analysis of the slavery question included a sweeping indictment of racism. -
Letter to Mr. Strickland
Child replies to Strickland’s request for her autograph and information about John Brown, noting, “The only letter I ever received from John Brown I gave to a Sanitary Commission Fair in time of the war. They Sold it for $25.” About Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry she writes, “Noble old man! His foray into Virginia seemed a wild project, but the feeling that impelled him was grand: and I know of nothing in History more sublime than his conduct in prison, and at the place of execution. I shall never again witness such moral heroism as was brought out by the struggle of Freedom with Slavery.” -
Progress of Female Virtue: Engraved by A. Cardon from the Original Drawings by Mrs. Cosway
Maria Hadfield grew up in Florence, where she studied art, copying paintings at the Uffizi under Johan Zoffany. She was elected to the Florentine Accademia delle Arti del Disegno at eighteen. Influenced by Henry Fuseli and Angelica Kauffman, Cosway continued to paint after her marriage, but her husband, the miniaturist Richard Cosway, would not permit her to sell her work. A pioneer in liberal education, she established a number of girls schools in Italy. The aquatints in Progress of Female Virtue are from her drawings. -
The Alpha
Helen Pitts Douglass, second wife of Frederick Douglass, and Dr. Caroline Winslow co-edited the feminist newspaper, The Alpha. Published monthly, it covered both social and political issues. The Alpha advocated for reproductive rights, was enlightened about childbearing, and supported women’s suffrage, sex education, and the right of women to enter professions. The newspaper ran from September 1875 to August 1888, with Pitts Douglass ending her involvement around 1877. -
Manuscript medical certificate
In this fragment of a certificate, Dr. J. H. Fairfax notes that he has examined an enslaved woman named “Alsy, belonging to the estate of R[. . . ?] in the employment of Mr. Charles Mothershead and find her to be labouring under a ‘procidentia uteri, or falling down of the womb,’” a prolapsed uterus. This condition sometimes occurs after childbirth and can be caused by severe beatings. Fairfax determined that Alsy “may be made usefull by the application of an instrument properly adjusted, to keep the part from coming down.” -
Letter to Robert Adams
In 1842 schoolteacher Sophia Foord moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, to join the recently formed utopian Northampton Association of Education and Industry. Founded to promote social reform through cooperative work, the NAEI was race-, class-, gender-and religion-equal. Foord writes that “this has become quite a depot for fugitives,” noting that “the slaves escape so frequently that their masters say . . . the Abolitionists must have ‘a railroad under ground.’” She also describes rather sarcastically a visit to writer and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. -
Medical morals, illustrated with plates and extracts from medical works: designed to show the pernicious social and moral influence of the present system of medical practice, and the importance of establishing female medical colleges, and educating and employing female physicians for their own sex
During the Victorian Era, many considered childbirth and midwifery to be unseemly and male midwifery indecent. George Gregory shared these views, and he championed the establishment of female medical colleges so that men would not be needed in “this disagreeable branch of medicine.” In Medical Morals he includes images and quotations from the English translation of J. P. Maygrier’s Nouvelles démonstrations d’accouchemens to illuminate his point. Dr. Maygrier’s comprehensive and beautifully illustrated work on obstetrics portrays the changes in a pregnant woman’s body, documenting labor and delivery. In some of the images, he intended to show a discreet examination of a woman. In Gregory’s later engravings, after Maygrier’s images, the examination takes on a sinister character. -
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman
Sarah Moore Grimké and her sister Angelina were formidable and vocal anti-slavery activists and agitators for the rights of women. Growing up on a large plantation in South Carolina, Grimké disregarded the law forbidding teaching slaves to read. The sisters moved to Philadelphia, becoming Quakers, though both abandoned Quakerism over its racism and sexism. The Grimké sisters were delegates to the Women’s Anti-Slavery Convention held in New York in 1837 and, with Grace Bustill Douglass, co-founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. These Letters were addressed to Mary Parker, president of the 1837 convention. -
[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. -
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.
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