10 The New York Review
What the Little Woman Was Up To
Susan Tallman
Five Hundred Years of
Women’s Work:
The Lisa Unger Baskin Collection
an exhibition at the David M.
Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Duke University, Durham,
North Carolina, February 28–
June 15, 2019; and the Grolier Club,
New York City, December 11, 2019–
February 8, 2020.
Catalog of the exhibition edited by
Naomi L. Nelson, Lauren Reno, and
Lisa Unger Baskin.
Grolier Club/David M. Rubenstein
Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
159 pp., $60.
One of the most celebrated attractions
at Ph i ladelph ia’s 18 76 C enten n ia l I nter-
national Exhibition was the installation
of Great Plains and Rocky Mountain
wildlife in the Kansas-Colorado Build-
ing. Stereoscopic souvenir cards show
a faux mountainside crammed like a
Victorian what-not shelf with deer,
goats, polecats, and raptors. A cougar
is suspended mid-leap over the mouth
of a cave, where a lady sits with a bird
(species unidentifiable) in her lap. Not
visible in the photographs, but noted in
accounts, was a sign over the cave en-
trance announcing “Woman’s Work.”
The woman in question—the one
whose work it was—was Martha Max-
well, and Mary Dartt’s 1879 book On
the Plains, and Among the Peaks, or,
How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural
History Collection opens in the voice
of an incredulous visitor: “‘Woman’s
work!’ What does that mean?... ‘Does
that placard really mean to tell us a
woman mounted all these animals?’...
‘Did she kill any...?’”^1 The answer was,
of course, a double-barreled “yes!”
Born in 1831, Maxwell was a for-
mer Midwest schoolmarm who had
remade herself as an entrepreneurial
gun-toting naturalist and progenitor of
the natural history diorama (a subspe-
cies of eastern screech owl is named
for her). She evidently enjoyed an un-
usual array of talents, and one might
assume that such nonconforming cre-
ative achievement had been preceded
by angry repudiations of her womanly
duties—feet stomped, suitors spurned,
parents defied. One would be wrong. It
was through adventures encountered
while helping secure a house for her
family that Maxwell, through a series
of pragmatic steps, found her voca-
tion. She had perseverance certainly,
but more important, a nimble imagina-
tion—an invaluable asset when trying
to get things done from a social posi-
tion that generally demands constant
accommodation to the needs of others.
Woman’s work indeed.
Perseverance gets celebrated a lot,
strategic tractability less so, but one
of several important lessons conveyed
by “Five Hundred Years of Women’s
Work: The Lisa Unger Baskin Collec-
tion” was that adaptability is a lifesaver.
Hosted by New York’s private Grolier
Club, the nation’s preeminent biblio-
philic society, this dense and discursive
exhibition included some two hundred
objects, mostly books, selected from
the more than 16,000 accumulated by
the collector and activist Lisa Baskin
over the course of forty-five years.
(The collection was acquired by the
Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s
History and Culture at Duke Univer-
sity in 2015, and the exhibition was
cocurated by Baskin, Naomi L. Nelson,
and Lauren Reno; an earlier iteration
took place last year at Duke’s David M.
Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript
Library.) The exhibition’s compass was
broad but not encyclopedic: everything
on view came from Europe or North
America and, with the exception of a
thirteenth-century land grant, post-
dates the arrival of printing on paper
in Europe and predates World War II.
The history these things present is thus
familiar in its broad strokes—the Re-
naissance, the Reformation, humanism,
the Enlightenment, New World slav-
ery, abolition, women’s suffrage, anar-
chism—but viewed through the lens of
female agency, exotic in its particulars.
As might be expected, “Five Hun-
dred Years” cheerfully banged the
drum of female attainment, piling up
proof that women have accomplished
more, across multiple domains, than
is commonly acknowledged. It show-
cased the great and the good—So-
journer Truth (a book and a demure
portrait-photograph card marketed by
Truth and bearing the legend “I Sell the
Shadow to Support the Substance”);
Susan B. Anthony (photo and letter);Marguerite de Navarre, the polymath
sister of François I (a volume of verse
for the common folk); as well as lesser-
known foremothers: a pamphlet by the
Reformation theologian Katharina
Schütz Zell; a book by Laura Terra-
cina, the most published Italian poet of
the sixteenth century; a mathematical
treatise by the eighteenth-century Mila-
nese prodigy Maria Gaetana Agnesi.
Betwixt and between flowed a cascade
of firsts: the first book known to have
been typeset by women (a 1478 edition
of Lives of the Popes and Emperors
produced by the Dominican nuns of
San Jacopo di Ripoli in Florence); the
first book published by an English colo-
nist in America (Anne Bradstreet’s 1650
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in
America); the first book published by an
African-American of either sex (Phillis
Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects,
Religious and Moral from 1773).
All this is admirable and interesting,
but the value of “Five Hundred Years”
went beyond the parade of exceptional
women who managed to keep up with
the guys, doing the things guys do. It
lay in the show’s interleaving of spec-
tacular achievements and humble ones,
like the oddly affecting, thimble-sized
socks and hats knitted by Irish school-
girls in 1850. Glued into a manual pub-
lished for use in the National Female
Schools, they tell us nothing about what
these girls thought or felt. Were they
proud of their skills? Bored by them?
Yearning for a larger life? And what,
in any case, would that have meant to a
girl on an island that had been starvingto death for three years? The woolens
are mute. But they embody the endless
making and making do, the honor and
necessity of caring and creating at the
heart of billions of unremarked lives.
At the Grolier, it was easy to find your-
self gently and subversively nudged
into reconsidering the parameters of
“achievement” altogether.Baskin describes the collection’s focus
as “social history,” but she stretches
that rubric in unexpected directions.
So while she amassed pamphlets and
periodicals that exploited the expe-
diency of printing for broadcasting
ideas, she also pursued the sumptuous
handmade bindings created by women
aligned with the turn-of-the-century
Arts and Crafts movement. Baskin
understands printing and design—she
has worked in the rare book trade, and
her late husband was the artist Leon-
ard Baskin, whose Gehenna Press pro-
vided a bracing New England riposte
to the languid grace of the French livre
d’artiste. She recognizes that choices
of materials and modes of facture can
also be statements of social ideals:
in the case of Emma Goldman’s an-
archist monthly Mother Earth, pro-
duction decisions were driven by the
need to spread the word broadly and
inexpensively; in that of Phoebe Anna
Tarquair’s illuminated manuscript of
Ten ny s on’s In Memoriam, they mark a
stand against the dehumanizing effects
of industrialization.
The progressive politics underly-
ing both Goldman and Tarquair’s
ambitions have been a driving force
in Baskin’s life, and have shaped her
collection in ways both explicit and im-
plicit. Coming of age during the civil
rights movement, Baskin cut her politi-
cal teeth participating in anti– Vietnam
War protests. When feminism burbled
up as a political principle and cultural
critique, she was there. By the late
1960s, she was, she writes, actively col-
lecting “things relating to women.”
The sloppy inclusiveness of “things”
is apposite: in and around the incu-
nabula and swish artisanal bindings
is a wealth of ephemera and “realia,”
the librarian’s umbrella term for all
manner of objects that add context or
evidence to an archive. These range in
scale and importance from Virginia
Woolf’s writing desk to mass-market
tchotchkes. As Elizabeth Campbell
Denlinger notes in the catalog, many of
the collection’s holdings “are humble in
and of themselves, not especially rare,
and this is one of the best things about
it.” Baskin’s attraction to dead people’s
business cards, for example, is pecu-
liar only until you begin reading, and
encounter people like the wonderfully
named Eleanor Ogle. She was a fruit-
erer in Covent Garden, but any whiff of
Eliza Doolittle seediness is snuffed out
by the rococo profusion of pineapples,
melons, overflowing baskets, and sinu-
ous copperplate of her engraved card.
The collection’s cache of household
goods reflects bourgeois domesticity
while also often advertising political
beliefs, not always in straightforward
ways. The suffragette swag includes
a tea service designed by SylviaOne half of a stereographic souvenir card from the 1876 Centennial
International Exhibition in Philadelphia showing a display of the naturalist Martha
Maxwell’s wildlife specimens, with Maxwell seated at the centerLisa Unger Baskin Collection /Rubenstein Library, Duke University(^1) Mary Dartt, On the Plains, and
Among the Peaks; or, How Mrs. Max-
well Made Her Natural History Collec-
tion (Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger,
1879), p. 5.