to be the province of women. Cooking. Cleaning. Tending. Gardening. But his-
torian and activist Lisa Unger Baskin has been exploring women’s work going
back seven centuries, and she has found quite a different story. Women have
been holding up half the sky while toiling in jobs considered “men’s work.” “It
is so important for our girls, and for women too, to see what they can do and be,
so it is not just in their imaginations,” Unger Baskin told me recently. “And it is
so important for men, for us all really, to see female accomplishment, because
over centuries humans have been conditioned to see women as the weaker, less
capable sex, when all around us there is evidence showing that simply is not true.”
Unger Baskin has spent a lifetime trying to add to that evidence file, amassing
an astounding collection documenting women’s work through photographs,
books, trade cards, artifacts, personal letters, and ephemera. She believes
her collection, housed at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and
Culture at Duke University, is the world’s largest record of women in work and
professional enterprise.
Women have worked—and succeeded—in occupations long seen as the
province of men: as laborers, scientists, printers, navigators, and mechanics—
sometimes purposely keeping a low profile to avoid reproach, but most often
invisible simply because of their gender.
“I think that the stories that we can glean from what I put together, from my
collection, say something about power, something about disenfranchisement,”
Unger Baskin said. “The assumption that women did not do things that were
always male dominated is just not true.”
Her collection grew out of curiosity and umbrage. She traveled to book fairs
and rare book auctions, looking for signs that women were reading and getting
educated and working all along. She discovered that women were allowed to
inherit and run a printing press if they were widowed because the work was so
important and the expertise so rare. As a result, there were several significant
women printers in colonial America.
She discovered that Sara Clarson was working as a bricklayer in England in 1831,
that Madam Nora led a troupe of glassblowers who traveled the United States in
1888 making whimsical sculptures, and that Margaret Bryan introduced math
and astronomy into the curriculum at her girls school in London in 1799. She
discovered that Maria Gaetana Agnesi wrote a widely translated mathematics
textbook in Milan in the mid-1700s and that the German naturalist and illus-
trator Maria Sibylla Merian made the first observations and drawings of insect
metamorphosis in natural settings.
As a collector, Unger Baskin often was not taken seriously. That worked in
her favor as she snapped up documents, books, personal letters, needlepoint,
engraved silver—things that no one wanted or understood—often for just a
dollar or two at bookshops, book fairs, and flea markets.
She talks about her discoveries as if the women she’s rescued from anonym-
ity are old friends. One that breaks her heart was an enslaved woman called
Alsy, who lived in Virginia. Unger Baskin found her story on a fragment from
an 1831 medical certificate in which a physician described a device to hold up
Alsy’s prolapsed uterus so she could “be made usefull” again. His subject’s
humanity was of little interest, but her labor was so important that he was
tasked with getting her back on her feet. Unger Baskin said this particularly
devastating story shows how women through time have been considered
inferior and yet essential.
Enslaved and indentured women are included in the collection, along with
items from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emma Goldman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
the Brontë sisters, Virginia Woolf, and Sojourner Truth. Unger Baskin sees her
collection as a rearview mirror that can guide women as they move forward,
imagining a future that is attainable but avoiding the mistakes of the past.
One of those big lessons is inclusion. Aspirational women’s movements of
the past—reaching all the way back to the 18th century—have been led by and
centered on white, educated, upper-class women. Even abolitionists fighting
for the rights of the enslaved often kept those women at a distance socially.
Sojourner Truth is known for rattling the conscience of the nation with her “Ain’tMany women
had to
strategically
build an
audience for
their work
without
calling
too much
attention to
themselves,
because
they were
operating
well outside
of their
prescribed
roles.