Browse Items (77 total)
Sort by:
-
-
Miss M. A. Honeywell […] Fine Cutting and Embroidery, on Paper, Executed by Herself, without Hands
Martha Ann Honeywell was one of dozens of atypically figured itinerant artists and performers in the early nineteenth century. She was born with truncated arms and legs, no hands, and only one small foot with three toes. She learned to make paper cutouts and silhouettes, embroider, create waxwork, and write in miniature. Honeywell was a savvy businesswoman who for most of her career traveled alone on national and international tours earning her own living. She exhibited her works in a beautiful traveling pavilion at parades and fairs. -
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. -
Geburtshilfliches Taschenphantom zur Darstellung des Beckenausgangs-Mechanismus der Kopflagen und der Operationen bei denselben nebst einer Besprechung der Eintheilung, Diagnose, Pathologie und Therapie der Kopflagen
Mueller’s book explicating the various positions of the fetus as it descends through the birth canal during delivery is accompanied by an interactive anatomical model of a female pelvis. It illustrates changes to the fetal head and the use of forceps. Forceps for delivery were first invented in the sixteenth century and new designs were developed over time. Anatomical models were often used for both students and practitioners to learn new methods. In this case, the interactive model allows the reader to train in procedures and positioning of forceps for delivery. -
Letter to Sarah M’Clintock
Mary Ann M’Clintock was a Quaker and founded the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society. Her house in Waterloo, New York, was a stop on the underground railroad. In her home, over tea, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth M’Clintock, Martha Coffin Wright, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met in 1848 and decided to call a convention for Women’s Rights. They drafted the Declaration of Sentiments on M’Clintock’s tea table over the course of two days. At the end of this letter to M’Clintock’s daughter, Stanton inquires “Would you sell the table on which the Declaration was written and what would you ask for it?” She did purchase the table. -
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. -
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. -
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 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. -
[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. -
[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. -
Madame Restell!: her secret life-history from her birth to her suicide: full details: showing how she became rich: who her victims were, and how she held them in her power: her tricks and devices: what she did and how she did: all about her: "the most terrible being ever born"
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. -
[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. -
Discourses to Women on Medical Subjects
In 1852, Anna Longshore-Potts, was one of the first graduates of the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She believed knowledge would lead to prevention of disease, and she dedicated herself to educating women on health and physiology. Between 1876 and 1885 she lectured throughout the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and Great Britain. She often contributed the proceeds from her well-attended lectures in England to local charities. In 1887 her Discourses to Women on Medical Subjects was published, the culmination of her work educating women about gynecological and reproductive health. -
Jennie Nuttall autograph album
Lizzie Borden, famously indicted for the murder of her parents, grew up in the rapidly industrializing city of Fall River, Massachusetts, as the daughter of a prominent local family. After leaving high school, she became active in her church and in local women’s clubs, like many respectable young ladies. Perhaps she knew Jennie Nuttall, who owned this autograph book, from one of these contexts. When Borden was accused of killing her parents with an ax, churchwomen, temperance activists, and suffragists came to her defense, finding it impossible to imagine that a Christian lady could have done such a thing. Borden was acquitted.Tags 1800s -
Lucifer: The Light-Bearer
Moses Harman was active in the abolition movement in Missouri before and during the Civil War. He moved to Valley Falls, Kansas, in 1879, and became the editor of The Kansas Liberal, later renamed Lucifer, the Light Bearer. Anti-government and a supporter of eugenics, he published on issues such as women’s rights and birth control and, like Goldman and Margaret Sanger, was targeted by Comstock for distributing obscene literature. He moved the location of Lucifer several times, including to Chicago in 1896. On a lecture tour stop in Chicago in 1897, Goldman made a point of visiting Harman at the Lucifer offices. -
On the Plains, and Among the Peaks, or, How Mrs. Maxwell Made her Natural History Collection
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. Maxwell’s half-sister wrote a biography recounting her contributions as a scientist and documenting her correspondence with Spencer Fullerton Baird, the second Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Despite the quality of her work, Martha Maxwell struggled to make a living and died destitute. A few of Maxwell’s original specimens survive and are in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. -
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. -
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.”
Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info