Browse Items (76 total)
Sort by:
-
[Anti-slavery dessert service]
In Great Britain and the United States, women organized anti-slavery bazaars throughout the North to raise money and awareness for the cause. Members of female anti-slavery societies sold tokens, pottery, quilts, books, prints, and needlework. Some items were commercially produced, others made by hand. This dessert service is likely Staffordshire pottery transfer-ware. The images of two iconic elements of the visual vocabulary of the abolitionist movement—a black man kneeling in chains, and a black woman cradling a child—as well as the surrounding biblical passages were meant to evoke sympathy for the cause. The collection holds ten pieces, including a footed compote. -
[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. -
[Creamer with an image of the Ladies of Llangollen]; [Ladies of Llangollen figurine]
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. In the nineteenth century there was a thriving industry producing and selling objects commemorating the Ladies of Llangollen. Their images graced Staffordshire transfer-ware pottery, popular prints, and multitudes of ephemera. -
[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. -
[Poems and illustrations]
This lovely hand-bound manuscript was made by Mary B. Tuckey and others in Cork, Ireland, to be sold at the Boston Anti-Slavery Fair to raise money for the abolitionist cause. The beribboned floral page dedicated to Maria Weston Chapman was drawn by Mary Mannix, the secretary for the Anti-Slavery Societies of Cork. Chapman, organizer of the fair and a Garrisonian abolitionist, wrote Right and Wrong in Massachusetts and edited the annual the Liberty Bell. Frederick Douglass’ acclaimed visit to Cork is commemorated in the volume with a poem in his honor. The strong international bonds of the Abolitionist movement are made evident in this small book. -
[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 Emma Goldman]
Russian immigrant and anarchist Emma Goldman dedicated her life to combatting inequality, repression, and the exploitation of workers. She believed in direct action to bring about revolutionary change. Following the failed attempt on the life of Henry Clay Frick by her partner, Alexander Berkman, she abandoned her support of violence, embracing the tactics of civil disobedience, strikes, and boycotts to achieve political and economic equality. This is the only known copy of this image. -
[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. -
[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. -
[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 Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton]
Stanton and Anthony first met in 1851 at an anti-slavery meeting in Seneca Falls. Stanton was one of the leading philosophers of suffrage and human rights, while Anthony organized volunteers and directed the campaigns. When their efforts to have women’s suffrage included in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments failed, they established the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. In this portrait Stanton is wearing a dress with a pattern of chains, a powerful symbol that was adopted by both the anti-slavery and women’s suffrage movements. -
[Reward of merit for neatness and order given to Mary Morgan]
Following her husband’s financial losses, historian, educator, and writer Emma Willard established a boarding school in her home in Middlebury, Vermont. In 1821 she opened the Troy Female Seminary, offering women a college preparatory education on par with that available to men. The curriculum included science, mathematics, geography, and philosophy. The school was funded by the Common Council of Troy, New York. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was educated at the Troy Female Seminary, although Willard did not support the suffrage movement. The school remains open today as The Emma Willard School. -
[Virginia Woolf’s writing desk]
Writer, printer, and feminist Virginia Woolf was at the center of the Bloomsbury Group during the first half of the twentieth century and was one of the leading figures of modernist literature. Woolf commissioned this oak writing desk while she was in her teens and used it until she was around thirty years old. She specifically requested a standing desk. In 1929, Woolf gave the desk to her nephew, Quentin Bell, an artist and member of the Bloomsbury Group. His wife Anne Olivier Bell, the editor of Virginia Wool’s diaries, cut six inches off the legs to make it a sitting desk. Quentin Bell painted Cleo, the muse of history, on the sloped top in the style of the Omega Workshops. -
A portraiture of domestic slavery, in the United States: with reflections on the practicability of restoring the moral rights of the slave, without impairing the legal privileges of the possessor; and, a project of a colonial asylum for free persons of colour, including memoirs of facts on the interior traffic in slaves, and, on kidnapping: illustrated with engravings
In November 1815, Ann Williams and her daughters were torn from their family and sold to Georgia slave traders. In desperation, Williams jumped out a third-story window. Jesse Torrey, a physician visiting Washington, hearing her story, sought to interview her. He found her in bed with a broken back and broken arm. Her daughters had been taken south to be sold. Torrey subsequently published this account along with other narratives that he chronicled. In 1816 Williams’ suicide attempt prompted a Congressional inquiry into interstate slave trade. Williams later successfully petitioned for her freedom and for that of her children. -
Adeline Mowbray, or The Mother and Daughter
Amelia Opie managed to earn an income from her writing following the death of her husband, the artist John Opie, when she was 38. Her novel Adeline Mowbry is based on the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, despite the fact that Opie did not countenance Wollstonecraft's rejection of marriage. The two met briefly in the last years of Wollstonecraft's life. Opie, a Quaker convert, was involved with charitable works and worked with fellow Quaker Elizabeth Fry on prison reform. She advocated the abolition of slavery and was a delegate to the 1840 Anti-Slavery Convention. Her poem The Negro Boy’s Tale, also in the collection, is an uncompromising condemnation of slavery. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
Appeal of one half the human race, women, against the pretensions of the other half, men: to retain them in political, and hence in civil and domestic, slavery; in reply to a paragraph of Mr. Mill's celebrated "Article on government"
Philosopher Anna Wheeler was self-educated, reading Diderot, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Hays. Known as the "Goddess of Reason," she was ideologically aligned with French utopian socialist Charles Fourier. After leaving an abusive marriage with an alcoholic husband, she was critical of marriage and proposed cooperative community living as an alternative. In 1825 she collaborated with William Thompson on the socialist feminist Appeal. Thompson considered the text their joint property. Wheeler was among the first women to lecture publicly on the “Rights of Women.” She wrote using the pseudonym Vlasta, publishing articles on subjects such as the enslavement of women for men’s sensual pleasure and advocating the use of contraception. Wheeler's great-granddaughter was Lady Constance Lytton, the comrade of Emmeline Pankhurst. -
Census directory for 1811: containing the names, occupations, & residence of the inhabitants of the city, Southwark & Northern Liberties, a separate division being allotted to persons of colour: to which is annexed an appendix containing much useful information, and a perpetual calendar
The most significant woman bookbinder of the early American Republic, Jane Aitken ran the bindery at her father’s printing office. Her first imprint appears in 1796. In 1808 she printed and bound Thomson’s Bible (also in the collection), the first English translation of the Septuagint, the earliest Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. Aitken was the first American woman to print a Bible (Thomson's Bible, also in the collection.) Upon her father’s death in 1802, Aitken inherited the printing works and bookshop along with significant debt that had been incurred not by the shop but by her late brother-in-law. In 1813, all her equipment was sold, and Jane Aitken was imprisoned for debt. After her release, she continued to work as a bookbinder, but by 1815 her career as a printer was over. The Census Directory for 1811 is the first published census to include African Americans. It lists names, home addresses, and occupations for all Philadelphia inhabitants, as well as for local businesses, organizations, and professions, such as the Anti-Slavery Society, Mr. Peale’s Museum, churches, midwives, and “layers out of the dead.”
Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info