Browse Items (15 total)
Sort by:
-
Announcement: Three Important Lectures will be Given in London by Emma Goldman
A charismatic speaker, Emma Goldman was a powerful advocate for controversial causes including free speech, gender equality, defense of sexual minorities, union organization, and birth control. The Lisa Unger Baskin collection includes a significant number of letters, documents, and printed material related to Goldman’s life, publishing, and activism. -
[Ticket for a lecture by Emma Goldman at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, Holborn, 1933]
A charismatic speaker, Emma Goldman was a powerful advocate for controversial causes including free speech, gender equality, defense of sexual minorities, union organization, and birth control. The Lisa Unger Baskin collection includes a significant number of letters, documents, and printed material related to Goldman’s life, publishing, and activism. -
[Tea cup and saucer, and bowl]
In 1889, reformer Jane Addams and bookbinder Ellen Gates Starr founded the Hull-House social settlement in an immigrant neighborhood in Chicago. Hull-House members provided English classes, art clubs, kindergarten, libraries, and activities for the neighborhood and worked for social reform. Hull-House Kilns was a commercial pottery associated with their art school. Many of the staff and potters were recent Mexican immigrants. The collection holds four tea cups with matching saucers and a small serving bowl. All are stamped “Hull House Kilns, Chicago.” The items are in the style of Myrtle Merritt French, one of the founders of the pottery. -
Annual Report for the Year 1923
Jane Edna Hunter founded the Working Girls Association in 1911, changing the name to the Phillis Wheatley Association in 1912. Her motivations were similar to Victoria Matthews’, as she sought to provide support and vocational training for single African American women migrating to Cleveland from the South. Her own negative experience as a black woman moving from South Carolina and attempting to find a safe place to set up residence and work as a nurse inspired her to open the Association. Hunter graduated from Cleveland Law School in 1925 and continued to serve as the Association’s Executive Director until 1947. -
Deportation, Its Meaning and Menace: Last Message to the People of America
Emma Goldman’s opposition to the draft during World War I led to her deportation in 1919, and she continued her fight in exile. She and her partner Alexander Berkman wrote Deportation while detained at the Ellis Island Deportation Station. In it, they decry the United States’ treatment of Russian Americans and immigrants now facing deportation, drawing parallels between these American policies and European despotism. -
Anarchism and Other Essays
First published in 1910 under anarchist Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth imprint, this collection of essays reveals the range of issues in which Goldman was active. It includes essays on suffrage, free love, the Modern School movement, political violence, and patriotism. -
Letter to Comrade [Thomas H. Keell]
Anarchist Emma Goldman worked as a nurse and midwife on the Lower East Side of New York in the 1890s. She became a mentor to Margaret Sanger and brought her into the fight against the Comstock Law of 1873. When Goldman was arrested in 1916, she managed to turn the trial into a national forum on birth control. In this letter, she criticizes Sanger for focusing on birth control as a single issue, rather than working on the larger political, social, and economic forces that led to its suppression. -
The Forerunner
Feminist and writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman launched The Forerunner in November 1909, wanting an outlet to voice opinions deemed too controversial by other editors. She was the sole author, artist, and editor of its essays, fiction, poetry, and humor. The content was meant, in her own words from the first issue, “to stimulate thought, to arouse hope, courage, and impatience . . . to voice the strong assurance of better living, here, now, in our own hands to make.” The Forerunner had a modest circulation of around 1,500 subscribers, and Gilman struggled to expand readership in its seven years of publication. -
Prejudice Unveiled: and Other Poems
In this volume of poetry, activist poet Lizelia Moorer, a teacher at South Carolina’s first black college, presents a sweeping portrayal of the nature of racial oppression. She noted that white writers misrepresented the experience of African Americans in the South and set out to tell “the unvarnished truth.” She confronts lynching, debt peonage, rape, segregation, and the hypocrisy of the church. The frontispiece may be the first depiction of an African American woman with a typewriter. -
Mother Earth
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. Goldman published the journal Mother Earth and served as its editor in 1906. Alexander Berkman assumed editorial duties from 1907 to 1915. Mother Earth served as an outlet for Goldman’s own and her colleagues’ writings on issues deeply connected to the anarchist cause such as education, the labor movement, women’s rights and birth control. -
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 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. -
[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. -
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. -
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.
Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info