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Book Category: Women's Studies

Euphoria/Dysphoria Artist’s Book

“The concept for the book was to visualize some of the experiences, thoughts, and feelings that people in the transgender community and beyond might identify with.” —Ren Barnes

Linocuts and monoprints, both independently and merged by transfer processes, guide the reader through the feeling of being a self in a body that does not suit. Especially potent is the book’s center, where the middle leaf features on both sides feminine breasts, and at the turn of the page swaps between being removed from or added to a masculine chest. The fluidity of the structure, both in this core element and in the ability of the book as a whole to be read in either direction, emulates the fluidity of the gendered experience.

Ren Barnes is assistant professor of graphic and animation design at Longwood University. He received his BFA from the Pennsylvania State University and completed his MFA at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Sarah Vaughan’s Handwritten Gershwin Lyrics

This personal notebook of the great jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan includes a collection of lyrics handwritten by Ms. Sassie herself for songs by the Gershwin Brothers. Vaughan’s practice was to memorize lyrics by writing them out, then use them as a crib sheet during the performance. Vaughan’s Gershwin Songbooks, first released in the 1950’s and seldom out of print, are classics in the jazz/vocal cannon.

This notebook includes a Porgy and Bess medley featuring a chorus of “It ain’t necessarily so,” transitioning to “I Loves You, Porgy.” There’s also a medley of “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” and “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” A third medley of “Swanee” and “Strike Up the Band” was not included in Vaughan’s 1982 Gershwin Live! recording, but was a staple of her touring act.

There are also “To-Do” lists, as well as some very personal and humorous notes about flight information, computer research, and even reminders to “order ham.”

Living Single production scripts

Living Single was a television sitcom created by Yvette Lee Bowser that aired for five seasons on the Fox network, from August 22, 1993, to January 1, 1998. The show centered on six Black friends living the single life in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. The series focused on two different households in one brownstone, one shared by a trio of independent women and another shared by two male friends who had known each other since childhood while living in Cleveland, Ohio.

Bowser’s initial goal was to develop a show about herself and her friends that would change the portrayal of young Black people on television. Her overall goal was to portray Black characters positively and less stereotypically. She also noted that the women represented on Living Single are four different sides of herself, saying in an interview, “I’ve been as ditsy as Synclaire, as superficial as Regine, as bitter as Max, and as focused and driven as Khadijah.”

Throughout its run, Living Single became one of the most popular African-American sitcoms of its era, ranking amongst the top five in African-American ratings in all five seasons.

Women Protest “Olivetti girl” TV Ads

In 1972, Italian typewriter company Olivetti launched a marketing campaign created by legendary ad man George Lois that featured “Olivetti Girls,” secretaries who were supposed to be more competent than their peers because of the “brainy” electric typewriter they used. It was developed as the firm faced competition from IBM. According to Lois: “We had to make the Olivetti typewriting famous for secretaries to accept it.”

Unfortunately, while sales of Olivetti typewriters “went through the roof,” secretaries and feminists were outraged by the series of tv and print ads.

Time magazine reported in its March 20 issue: This week a group of New York City secretaries, backed by members of the National Organization of Women, plans to picket the headquarters of Olivetti Corp., which is running ads that infuriate feminists. The ads promote “brainy” typewriters that are supposed to eliminate some typing errors made by dippy-looking secretaries, who presumably lack the brains to avoid them in the first place. In the TV commercial, the secretary is shown as a vacuous sex kitten who finds that she can attract men by becoming “an Olivetti girl.

This rare archive documenting the protest includes photographs of the women protestors carrying signs outside Olivetti headquarters. Additional photos show a man setting up the “Olivetti Weary Protestors Relief Bar,” where “the liberator” was served: “one part orange juice, one part Cointreau, one part champagne.”

Lois—in large part the inspiration for Mad Men’s Don Draper—responded to the protestors with a TV ad featuring Joe Namath as the “Olivetti girl” to a real-life woman executive who is so impressed with Namath’s typing that she hits on him in the end.

Grundig Stenorette Dictating Machine

The first Grundig dictation device, Stenorette, was launched on the market in 1954. It was one of the first truly portable dictation machines and was known for its compact size and stylish design. Three years later Max Grundig opened what he called the “largest tape recorder factory in the world” in Bayreuth, Germany. Since then dictation devices from Grundig Business Systems have been produced at this location.

Instructions for a dictation machine — Manual for Stenorette dictation machine, West Germany, 1950s.

This adoption item includes a portfolio of advertisements dating from 1913 through 1975, which show different types of dictation technologies over time, uses, and gendered and raced office dynamics in which their manufacturers imagined they would be used.

An advert for a dictation machine from an older publication — 1938 Dictaphone Advertisement, Progress Cabinet Dictation Typewriter

Panther Sisters on Women’s Liberation

The Movement newspaper was published in San Francisco from 1964 to January 1970 by Friends of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). This later issue is notable for its centerfold poster featuring artwork by graphic artist and Black Panther Emory Douglas (b. 1943), alongside an interview with six Black Panther women on the women’s liberation movement.

Other content includes articles on labor struggles in San Francisco, the United Farm Workers, on the upcoming Days of Rage in Chicago (by Weathermen Kathy Boudin and Terry Robbins, who would die in the Greenwich Village explosion six months later), resistance in Ireland; a letter from Black Panther Ericka Huggins; poetry and smaller news items; and an update on Martin Sostre’s imprisonment.

The rear cover features a comic advising kids on how to revolt against tradition and authority at school.

Ritalin Prescription for Billie Holiday

Original handwritten prescription from Billie Holiday’s doctor, Emil G. Conason, prescribing “Tabs Ritalin” for “Billy [sic] Holiday McKay / 133 W. 47 St” and dated March 12, 1956. Today, methylphenidate is the stimulant doctors most often prescribe for children with ADHD. It was first made in 1944 and marketed in 1954 as Ritalin. At first, it was used to treat conditions such as chronic fatigue and depression, the context in which it would have been prescribed to Holiday.

Billie Holiday Signed Bar Tab

In September of 1958, Billie Holiday performed at Detroit’s Flame Show Bar located on John R Street or Paradise Valley’s “street of music”. Known as “Little Las Vegas,” the upscale entertainment venue hosted big acts like Dinah Washington and B.B. King, while also helping to start the careers of local talents like Jackie Wilson and LaVern Baker. This bar tab, likely from 1958, is signed “Lady Day,” Holiday’s nickname from her friend and music partner, Lester Young.

Shown with Ritalin Prescription for Billie Holiday

Gertrude Stein at Bilignin

Rare photo of Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) at age 60 by critic, novelist, and photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964), picturing Stein looking out over France’s Rhône Valley with mountains rising in the distance.

The mount is signed and inscribed in black ink, “For Alexander Smallens, in appreciation, Gertrude Stein.” The mount is also signed by Van Vechten.

From their first meeting in 1913, Stein and Van Vechten formed a unique and powerful relationship, and Van Vechten worked vigorously to publish and promote Stein’s work. Stein named him as her literary executor and he helped to usher into print works of hers that remained unpublished at the time of her death.

This photograph complements our Robert A. Wilson Collection of Gertrude Stein Materials, selections of which are currently on view in the exhibition Gertrude Stein in Circles: Spheres of Life and Writing.

On Suffragette Force-Feeding

In 1914, Frank Moxon wrote a 32-page pamphlet that is widely considered to be the most effective attack on forcible feeding in English prisons. While there had been earlier texts denouncing the practice against the imprisoned suffragettes, Moxon’s account, written while he was doctor in Moorfields, made the case most effectively. He begins his article by stating that he is going to avoid any “sentimental” approach to the problem and that his intention is to present a “frank and complete report on the medical aspects of this treatment.” The publisher, the Women’s Press, while an independent entity, played a strategic role in bringing suffrage into public discourse.

Wind Blown and Dripping: A Book of Aleutian Cartoons

This WWII publication of 150 military-themed cartoons that had appeared in the base newspaper of APO 980 on the Aleutian Island of Adak. This scarce gathering of cartoons provides a valuable perspective on how soldiers in the remote Aleutian Islands viewed themselves and their life in that environment.

The introduction is by the great Maryland-born crime fiction writer, screenwriter, and political activist Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), who had served in World War I and reenlisted for World War II at the age of 48. Posted to the Aleutian Islands, Hammett was given a more-or-less free hand running the base newspaper and brought two African Americans onto his staff, including Don. L Miller, creating one of the very first racially mixed units in the U.S. military. The three cartoonists—Bernard Anastasia, Oliver Pedigo, and Don L. Miller—each selected fifty of their own drawings for inclusion.

On Substance in Relation to Intellective Cognition typescript

In the 1950s, the American artist and poet I. Rice Pereira (1902-71) published several books expounding her philosophy, many at her own expense. On Substance in Relation to Intellective Cognition presents a history of concepts of “substance” in art, from the periods of the “primitives” through Egyptian, Greek, Alexandrian, Roman, Mithraism, Christianity, Mediaeval, Renaissance, and 20th Century, as well as a theory of substance as a physical concept in various philosophies. It’s likely that this work remains unpublished, as it doesn’t seem to match the contents of any of the works that Pereira published during these years.

With a poetic note to “Dear, Dear Lee” about the text: “Please do not become discouraged by the first 8 or 10 pages. They may be difficult. They are merely chunks of generalizations; set to give a fundamental feeling of the concept.”

“Votes for Women!” German Ceramics Collection

Our Women’s Suffrage Collection is now the home to a fun and inviting set of suffragette-themed porcelain figurines made around 1910 during the “Deeds, Not Words” era of the Women’s Social and Political Union. While the suffragettes on both sides of the Atlantic were known for being capitalist queens in terms of the material their organizations produced—everything from playing cards to elegant watches—a lot of commercial manufacturers were makings tons of money off the suffragette brand. These figurines bear witness to the consumer demand for décor pertaining to the “votes for women” movement.

Crystal of the Rose typescript

Best known as a visual artist, I. Rice Pereira (1902-71) was an early American proponent of abstraction as it developed in Europe. Although she was never at the center of any of the American avant-garde movements of the 20th century, Pereira was quite influential and had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1953 that traveled around the country. In the 1950s and 1960s, Pereira published several books expounding her philosophy, many at her own expense.

Written throughout the 1950s, usually individually dated here in the typescript, with the preface dated May 29, 1959, this collection of poems was published in 1959 as The Crystal of the Rose by the Nordness Gallery, in an addition of 300 copies (99 with an original watercolor). It was dedicated to Pereira’s sister who had died in 1941.

Suffrage Speeches from the Dock

This book contains highlights from the 1912 conspiracy trial of Emmeline Pankhurst, Fred Pethick Lawrence, and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence. In these speeches, Pankhurst and the other leading militant suffragists defend themselves against the charges of damaging city property in their attempt to publicize the issue of women’s suffrage. They illustrate the complexity of the issue and the ambivalence of the court, which found them guilty of damaging city property yet acknowledged the virtues of the cause for which they were fighting. The publisher, the Women’s Press, while an independent entity, played a strategic role in bringing suffrage into public discourse.

Concert Program for Josephine Baker and her International Revue

This concert program from Carnegie Hall is for “Josephine Baker and Her International Revue,” which ran from June 5-8, 1973 and featured special guests Bricktop and the George Faison Universal Dance Experience. The world-renowned singer and dancer, World War II spy, and activist was celebrating her golden jubilee as a performer. The show included some two dozen songs in both English and French.

Oscar Wilde Likes Madame Fontaine’s Bosom Beautifier

Oscar Wilde became a major celebrity in America during his Grand Tour of the country in 1882 and 1883, to the extent that his likeness was used to sell a variety of products, including Madame Marie Fontaine’s Bosom Beautifier breast-enlarging cream. The product seeks to restore “where the bosoms have become soft and flaccid, from whatever cause, its use will restore them and hardens the bosom, but gives to them the beautiful transparency so much admired.”

This trade card shows how Wilde intersected both high and low culture at the time of his tour, and how eager the American public was to not just enhance their collective bosoms, but to add a piece of Wilde’s wit and aesthetic to their homes.

Gem of Medieval Ottonian Manuscript Illumination

This superlative facsimile of the Hitda Codex, a masterpiece of manuscript production from Cologne during the Ottonian era, replicates an exquisite Christian Gospel book with twenty-two full-page miniatures rich in detail and painterly drama. The original manuscript was produced around 1000-20 and its extensive series of images of the life of Christ paired with monumental full-page framed inscriptions is unique in the history of manuscript art.

Commissioned by Abbess Hitda for her convent at Meschede and dedicated to Saint Walburga, this codex stands out for its depictions of women in relationship to the divine. Among these are many images of Virgin Mary, as one might expect, especially in the nativity and infancy scenes. But less familiar women—Saint Peter’s mother-in-law, a widow whose son Christ raises from the dead, and a woman accused of adultery—play roles in the miracle scenes.

A Century of Jewish Thought

One of only seven known copies worldwide (and the only in the state of Maryland) of a speech given by Baltimore’s own Henrietta Szold to the Baltimore section of the National Council of Jewish Women. It explicitly discusses Zionism by name more than a year before Theodor Herzl would go on to convene the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in August 1897.