Women's Studies Interest Group Tours the American Antiquarian Society Library in Worcester
On Friday, October 15, 2004, eighteen Women's Studies Interest Group members from four New England states gathered at the Goddard-Daniels house of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. WSIG members and AAS Library staff Gigi Barnhill (Curator of Graphic Arts) and Laura Wasowicz (Curator of Children's Literature) got acquainted over coffee and pastries. We then walked across the street to the AAS Library, an independent, internationally known research library with incomparable collections in American history and culture.
The American Antiquarian Society was founded in 1812 by Isaiah Thomas, a Revolutionary War patriot and a printer and publisher (whose printing press is on exhibit in the AAS Library). The Library's collections "document the life of America's people from the colonial era through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Collections include books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, broadsides, manuscripts, music, graphic arts, and local histories." The goal of the AAS is to acquire one copy of everything printed in America prior to 1877. Thus far it has acquired two-thirds of the items printed in America between 1639 and 1820. Their holdings from 1821 through 1876, while less comprehensive, compare favorably with the holdings of the Library of Congress. Under Its Generous Dome is a guide to the collections and programs of the AAS. There is also an online Catalog, containing records for books, pamphlets, manuscripts, newspapers, lithographs, and broadsides. In addition to the Guidebook and Catalog, there is a Collection Access chart detailing cataloging status of each collection.
The Library is a welcoming, user-friendly facility, open, free of charge, to researchers, scholars, and students. Prospective library users are requested to present two forms of identification. Undergraduate students with letters of introduction from their professors are encouraged to use the library; graduate students do not require letters of introduction. The library is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesday.
The Women's Studies Interest Group was especially interested in learning about the collections as they pertained to women and girls. The curators gathered materials in their respective areas (periodicals, graphic arts, books, manuscripts, etc.) representing materials by or about women and girls and gave presentations illustrating the range of materials available for the study of women and girls in the AAS Library.
Newspapers and Periodicals
Our first speaker was Vince Golden, Curator of Newspapers and Periodicals. Vince distributed a list of women printers and publishers listed in Clarence Brigham's History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690 - 1820 (AAS, 1947). The women printers and publishers were widows of printers and had been involved, probably as typesetters, in the business prior to the husband's death. One such widow was Catherine Zenger, who published the New York Weekly Journal from 1746 to 1748, after the death of her husband, John Peter Zenger.
Women were also involved in the publication of amateur newspapers from 1808 onward, although the availability of inexpensive table top presses in 1868-1869 meant that such papers could be produced at home. One amateur newspaper, the Penfield (NY) Extra, was taken over by the twelve year old sister of a young man killed in the Civil War. She kept the paper going for several years, and exchanged the Penfield Extra with professional newspapers, quoting from those papers and citing her sources.
Women were also involved in the publication of magazines. A handout listing "A Sampling of Women's Periodicals at the American Antiquarian Society" included such titles as Sibyl: A Review of the Tastes, Errors, and Fashions of Society (1856-1864) and Toilet: A Weekly Collection of Literary Pieces Principally Designed for the Amusement of the Ladies (1801). Vince also showed us a page from Matrimonial Bliss, an 1878 periodical that was essentially singles' ads.
Vince told us that the AAS will take any pre-1877 newspapers currently taking up valuable space on other libraries' shelves. The AAS will microfilm the newspapers and send the donating library a copy of the microfilm.
Manuscripts and Archives
Tom Knoles, Curator of Manuscripts, said that there were 1400 manuscript collections.The 1876 cutoff date for collecting was not as firm for manuscripts, because diaries and family papers were collected as whole collections, irrespective of the dates of individual items.
Collection strengths include:
Examples of women's materials in the manuscript collection included diaries of students of Margaret Fuller; pocket diaries of an indentured servant; letters by former students of Quakers Lucy and Sarah Chase, who taught in a Freedman's School; letters of Abigail Adams; and records of the Worcester Soldiers Relief Society.
Children's Literature
Laura Wasowicz, Curator of Children's Literature, began by telling us that "looking at children's literature is like having your hand on the jugular vein." With inequality for women, wife beating a common practice, death never far away (no penicillin), life was filled with sadness and difficulty. These themes were all reflected in children's literature. The collection receives much use by cultural and social historians, who find information on the culture of play, childhood, sex role, sexual stratification of labor, and the expectations for young women in society. Laura distributed a handout detailing categories of holdings pertaining to children.
There are some 17,000 children's books and pamphlets. These include pedagogical titles as well as fiction. Books receive subject and genre analysis. While many of the books were written by women, the authors are not always known. Attribution is often difficult, because some books are written "by a mother" or "by a lady of Massachusetts." Additionally, single women often received short shrift in genealogies.
Examples of books include an 1837 Quaker catechism, with an illustration showing a woman speaking in meeting for worship (at a time when women did not speak to promiscuous crowds). The Library has a large collection of McLoughlin Brothers picture books (1858-1899), with titles such as The Little Housekeeper, which reveals much about sex roles and domestic education. Lydia Maria Child's The Girl's Own Book (1833) contained games, stories and crafts.
The collection also contains books written by children, periodicals for children, amateur periodicals, games, and manuscripts (e.g., papers of pedagogical authors and children's book publishers).
Book Collections 1821- 1876
Gigi Barnhill (Curator of Graphic Arts), speaking on behalf of Librarian Nancy Burkett, said that while the mission of the AAS was to collect everything printed in British North American up to 1820, collections from 1821 through 1876 were slightly more limited to titles with historical weight and significance: fiction, almanacs, city directories, non-fiction. Examples included African American books. The AAS has a copy of the first novel written by an African American woman, Our Nig: Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North, Showing that Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There, by "Our Nig," Mrs. H. E. Wilson, and an evangelical work, A Brand Plucked From the Fire, by an African American evangelist, Julia Foote (she states that Christianity made men and women equal).
Graphic Arts
Gigi Barnhill, Curator of Graphic Arts, talked about the extensive graphic arts collections of the AAS. The graphic arts collections include broadsides, sheet music, lithographs, prints, portraits, and photographs.The ephemera collection includes such items as trade cards and rewards of merit. These collections also shed light on many aspects of women's lives.
There are some 70,000 pieces of sheet music, 10,000 of which have pictorial lithograph covers, such as one depicting a woman and her two suitors. Pianos were common and this sheet music was meant to be played at home. The collection is used by musicologists and performers.
There are more than 250 games, both children's and adult's games. Drawing cards from games are a source of information on leisure, courtship, and childhood, for example.
The 19th century lithograph collection is individually cataloged. Lithographs offer information on familial relationships and the role of women and children. For example, The Little Scholar depicts children with their books, and adults reading. This particular print has subject access for children and reading.
Trade cards provide information on business practices and material culture in the late 18th and the 19th centuries. Those dating to from the late 18th century to 1860 are item level inventoried on the web page; the late 19th century cards are not. Trade cards show women in various occupations or working in the domestic sphere.
Broadsides (single-sheet printed documents) include 139 broadside ballads indicating women as authors.
The ephemera collection
includes such items as grape box labels depicting women under a grape arbor
packing grapes. The online exhibit, A
Woman's Work is Never Done, by Terri Tremblay, Curatorial Assistant,
is "a look at women's work, from before the American Revolution through
the Industrial Revolution, using selected images from the Society's collection."
Small images on trade cards, cartes de visite, and frontispieces that would
get lost in a large exhibit work well in an online exhibit such as this one.
Women artists are also represented in the graphic arts collection. Eliza Goodrich
was active as a miniatures painter. Emma Cross did oil paintings and hand painted
plaques.
In the political sphere, while women could not vote, they are represented in the abolition and suffrage movements. There are lithographs of abolitionist/women's rights advocate Abby Kelley Foster; her manuscripts are studied frequently by scholars. There are notices of women's rights conventions; sheet music, "We'll Show You When We Come to Vote;" and an illustration of women voting, with signs that say "Down with male rule!"
Cartes-de-visite, small photographs, are another significant collection for the study of women. There is an online inventory to this collection, including an alphabetical inventory of cartes de visite of women. There are cartes-de-visite of Sojourner Truth in the collection. She sold these to make a living.
Contemporary
Resources
Joanne Chaison, Research Librarian, spoke about the contemporary resources in
the collection. She distributed a list of 24 books "By Women About Women:
A Selective List of Women's Studies Books Researched at AAS," and
placed the books around the room for us to peruse at the conclusion of the program.
Titles represent research on women in politics, medicine, religion, social reform,
poetry, music, and more.
Patricia Cline Cohen, a women's studies scholar from UCSB at the AAS on an NEH
Fellowship, wrote: The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute
in Nineteenth Century New York. NY: Knopf, 1998.
(For an excellent overview of women's history resources, See Patricia Cline
Cohen, "Doing Women's History at the American Antiquarian Society,"
Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 102, pt 2 (1993): 295-305.)
Another title on the list is Rene Sentilles, Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs
Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity, Cambridge University Press,
2003. Sentilles received a Mellen Post-Dissertation Fellowship to conduct
her research on an actress.
Nicole Cooley has recently published The Afflicted Girls: Poems. Baton
Rouge, LSU Press, 2004. Cooley was the recipient of an AAS Creative
and Performing Artists and Writers Fellowship, in which she conducted research
for her book of poems about the Salem witchcraft trials.
There was an behind-the-scenes optional tour of the AAS Library and its five-level stacks area at the conclusion of the program.
Coming Attractions: Women Working, 1870 - 1930
At the conclusion of the AAS presentations, Thomas J. Michalak, Project Director of the Harvard University Library Open Collections Program, spoke about Women Working 1870-1930. Because the Women's Studies Interest Group is planning a 2005 program at Harvard University to learn more about Women Working, 1870-1930, Mr.Michalak's remarks are not summarized here. This scribe instead cites the summary contained on the project web page:
"Women Working 1870-1930
provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected
from Harvard's library and museum collections. This collection explores women's
roles in the US economy between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Working
conditions, conditions in the home, costs of living, recreation, health and
hygiene, conduct of life, policies and regulations governing the workplace,
and social issues are all well documented. The collection will contain more
than 2,200 books and pamphlets, 1,000 photographs and 10,000 pages from manuscript
collections."
Please check the WSIG web page in the coming months
for details of a winter/spring 2005 program at Harvard University on the Women
Working 1870-1930 open collections project.
Christina Smith
Co-Chair, Women's Studies Interest Group