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[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. -
[Colonial currency]
Dutch immigrant Anne Catharine Hoof Green worked alongside her husband in his Maryland printing business. When he died in 1767, she inherited his bankruptcy debt along with the shop—a pattern repeated in the lives of many women printers. She went on to successfully petition the state assembly to continue her appointment as public printer to the Province of Maryland. Sympathetic to the Revolution, she ran a busy shop and post office, printing books, pamphlets, almanacs, and colonial currency. She paid off the debt. Green used the process of nature printing to protect against counterfeiting. -
[Cover art for vellucent binding]
Dorothy Carlton Smyth, one of the esteemed “Glasgow Girls,” taught design at the Glasgow School of Art along with Jessie M. King and Frances Macdonald. She was noted for her costume design and book decoration. Smyth also worked for Chivers’ bindery in Bath as a book designer and illuminator. She created this design for a vellucent binding for Tennyson’s Poetical Works. In this technique, the design is painted on the underside of transparent vellum. Smyth was appointed the first female director of the Glasgow School of Art in 1933, but died before taking up the post. -
[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. -
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[Electrosilver Binding Commissioned by the Council of the Art Union London]
M. Lilian Simpson was a student at the Royal Academy when she created this electrosilver plate binding in 1894, for which she won the gold medal in the National Competition for Schools of Art. Simpson described her subject as a “Book of Life,” modeling the figure of Love in the center, surrounded by winged angels in each corner. She pierced and stamped the metal, unifying her design with flowers and pods of seeds. Love also appears on the clasp, “bind[ing] together the pages of the Book of Life.” She had intended the binding to cover a copy of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poems; however, the only two known copies are on blank-leaved albums. The British Library holds the other. This copy is bound in purple goatskin. Simpson died at twenty-six, just two years after completing this work.Tags Bookbindings -
[Flora Curtright at the Republican Printing Co., Cedar Rapids, Iowa]
The Industrial Revolution moved many kinds of work out of the home and into factories. Bookbinding was no exception. By the mid-nineteenth century many aspects of binding had been mechanized. For women, in many cases, work in a bindery paid relatively well. The inscription on the back of this photograph reads: “Flora [Lenter] Curtright when she worked in the binding factory.”Tags Trades -
[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. -
[Grant of land in Pisa, Italy, to Frater Baldiccione, signed Ildenbrandinus de Navacchio, 9 March 1240]
This scribal parchment is the earliest item in the collection. It documents the execution of a bequest made by the late Marcus to the Archbishop of Pisa. As was customary, Marcus’ wife Ugolinella was one of the executors. The gift was a vegetable garden adjoining a cemetery and a tannery—a rather odoriferous location. The bequest was intended to establish a house for repentant prostitutes, possibly the Sorores Repentite Hospitalis S. Marie Magdalene de Spina. In the early twelfth century, a campaign to rehabilitate prostitutes had begun, leading to the founding of convents and houses for repentant women. In medieval Italy, such houses, dedicated to Mary Magdalene, were usually founded through private initiatives. It is notable that the rector of the house is referred to as a custos, a word also used to mean a guardian or jailer.Tags 1200s to 1500s -
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[Label for bookseller Lydia Phillips]
In 1811 Lydia Phillips took over her late husband’s bookstore and circulating library in Philadelphia. She placed an advertisement in Poulson’s Daily Advertiser asking her friends and the public for their patronage as she continued the business to support herself and six small children. Ten years later she was still in business. Scottish Rite Masonic Library in Philadelphia holds a copy of Jeremy Belknap's The History of New-Hampshire with an identical label with Phillips’ name in manuscript. M. Carey is likely Mathew Carey, Philadelphia printer and publisher. -
[Laura Anne Fry’s paint box]
Laura Anne Fry was an accomplished wood carver and ceramics and china painter. She made significant contributions to the development of the Art Pottery Movement in America. At Cincinnati’s Rookwood Pottery, and later at Lonhuda Pottery Company, she developed and taught technically innovative glazing techniques, for which she received patents. When her glazing methods were used at Rookwood Pottery after she left the company, she sued for patent infringement and lost.Tags Trades -
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[Medical students and teacher at dissection]
Note the female medical student present. Women were refused admission to American and British medical schools until the mid-nineteenth century. American women seeking medical training were forced to go abroad to Europe. By mid-century, pressure from social reform movements led to the creation of schools and teaching hospitals specifically to educate women. Boston Medical College for Women, founded in 1848, was followed in 1850 by the Pennsylvania Medical College for Women. In 1870, the University of Michigan chartered the first American co-educational medical school, and others soon followed, but the debate over the merits of “mixed classes” continued. -
[Metamorphosis book]
Elizabeth Winspear, possibly a young woman of New England, boldly painted this harlequinade or metamorphosis, the earliest form of what we now call a movable book. With verse and images, Winspear instructs the reader on each leaf of her flap book to “turn down the leaf and see.” The book culminates with life’s final transformation: “O see, O see, thou art but dust, Thy gold & silver is but rust. Thy time is gone. Thy hour is spent. No worldly care can death prevent.”Tags 1700s -
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[Newspaper advertisement for bookseller Margery Yeo]
Margery Yeo is one of a number of women publishers and booksellers working in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She was the widow of Charles Yeo, a bookseller in Exeter who died around 1709. A widow who inherited a publishing or bookselling business and who chose not to remarry could herself hold a favorable status in trade guilds. In London, for example, a widow would have the right to take on apprentices and hold stock in the Stationers’ Company. Margery was active as a bookseller and binder from 1709 to 1728. For the first few years after her husband’s death she traded with her son as Margery and Philip Yeo. -
[No known title]
Samuel Bourne, albumen print from a wet collodion glass negative, circa 1864-66 -
[No known title] Image of dancers in public
Samuel Bourne, albumen print from a wet collodion glass negative, circa 1864-66 -
[Plaquette of a women bookbinder]
This plaquette was comissioned in 1900 by noted French bookbinder Charles Meunier. It shows a woman working at a sewing frame. The verso contains the text, “Aux amis de la Maison du Livre 1900 Ch. Meunier.”Tags Trades
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