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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.” -
The Value of Race Literature: An Address Delivered at the First Congress of Colored Women of the United States, at Boston, Mass., July 30th, 1895
Matthews was born into slavery in Georgia in 1861. Her mother fled, but returned to bring her children to New York City. Matthews was self-educated, as she had to work in domestic service to help support her family. By the 1890s, she was a successful journalist and a major figure in the black women’s club and anti-lynching movements. This speech emphasizes the importance of self-representation in black women’s writing to counter negative images in literature generally. Matthews opened the White Rose home for Colored Working Girls in New York in 1897, making sure it contained a library with books representing African Americans. -
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. -
The Rt. Honble. Lady Eleanor Butler & Miss Ponsonby
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. Their friend Lady Mary Parker Leighton painted a series of watercolors of their home Plas Newydd in the 1820s and 1830s. She drew the Ladies in their library, their favored place, both seated at a table, with bookshelves lining the walls. This engraving by Richard James Lane is based on one of Lady Leighton's drawings. Several of Lady Leighton's works are in the National Library of Wales. -
The Rt. Honble. Lady Eleanor Butler & Miss Ponsonby
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. Their friend Lady Mary Parker Leighton painted a series of watercolors of their home Plas Newydd in the 1820s and 1830s. She drew the Ladies in their library. This engraving by James Henry Lynch is based on one of Lady Leighton's drawings. -
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. -
The reason why the colored American is not in the world's Columbian exposition: the Afro-American's contribution to Columbian literature
Journalist, editor, and co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper, Ida B. Wells was a singularly influential African American woman. Her incendiary articles denouncing racism were reprinted in more than two hundred black weeklies. She led an international campaign against lynching, using documentation and photographs that confronted her readers with lynching’s stark horrific reality. In 1913, she founded Chicago’s Alpha Suffrage Club, the first suffrage organization for black women. This pamphlet, published by Wells, protests the exclusion of African Americans from the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago and urges a boycott of the Fair’s “Colored People’s Day.” Frederick Douglass contributed the introduction. -
The married woman's private medical companion: embracing the treatment of menstruation, or monthly turns, during their stoppage, irregularity, or entire suppression: pregnancy, and how it may be determined, with the treatment of its various diseases: discovery to prevent pregnancy, the great and important necessity where malformation or inability exists to give birth: to prevent miscarriage or abortion: when proper and necessary to effect miscarriage when attended with entire safety: causes and mode of cure of barrenness, or sterility
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. 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. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
Susan P. Parrott account book
This account book is signed on the front cover by a small blind embossed stamp on the last page indicating the paper was manufactured in Bath (likely Bath, Maine). The entries provide a compelling view into the activities and finances of a mid-nineteenth century seamstress running a small business. Some entries record payments to the women who did piecework for her, including a few African American women. Work done by Elizabeth Moulton, Frances, Mary Ann Ring, Mary Pettigrew, Elizabeth Hillyard, Catherine Anderson, Dorothy Anna Frisbee, and Elizabeth Akerman are recorded between March and November 1845.Tags 1800s -
Simple directions in needle-work and cutting out: intended for the use of the National Female Schools of Ireland: to which are added specimens of the work executed by the pupils of The Female National Model School
The National Female Schools of Ireland were founded in 1835 to teach girls from poor families respectable trades and skills. This book was intended as a teaching aid for courses on sewing, darning, knitting, and embroidery. The descriptive text, arranged by level of difficulty, is followed with hand-sewn examples of thirty-five techniques by the students. Simple Directions was published in several editions starting in 1835.Tags 1800s -
Sabbath lessons, or, An abstract of sacred history: to which is annexed, a geographical sketch of the principal places mentioned in sacred history
Eliza Palmer Peabody was a writer and educator. After her marriage, she started a household school that abandoned the rote recitation used in boys’ schools and instead encouraged a conversational model. She instilled in her pupils a belief in women and men’s equal capability as learners and in “the paramount importance of women to American civilization.” The class materials she developed were subsequently published. Her three daughters—Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia Hawthorne, and Mary Peabody Mann—were each notable in their own right. -
Rights of Women under the Late Constitutional Amendments
Judge Henry R. Selden advised Susan B. Anthony that she had the right to vote. When she was subsequently arrested for voting, he represented her in court. He later published the text of his argument. This is Judge Selden’s personal copy. -
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. -
Plates Illustrating the Geology & Scenery of Massachusetts
Orra White Hitchcock’s geological and botanical illustrations were published to accompany her husband Edward Hitchcock’s Report on the Geology, Mineralogy, Botany, and Zoology of Massachusetts, the first state geology published. She began her career teaching young women at Deerfield Academy, where she met Edward, who became a leading geologist and president of Amherst College. Orra’s work was integral to that of her husband, who atypically always gave her credit for her work. As a scientist herself, she observed and drew hundreds of specimens of native plants, mushrooms, and lichen. She was one of the most important American scientific illustrators of the time.
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