12 The New York Review
Pankhurst for the Women’s Social and
Political Union, in addition to buttons
and banners, sashes and scarves. A
posthumous ceramic statuette of the
gender-bending Ladies of Llangollen
in Wales (Sarah Ponsonby and Lady
Eleanor Butler, who lived together for
fifty years) portrays them in their twin
top hats and black riding habits, rosy
cheeked and adorable. Manufactured
for nineteenth-century middle-class
mantelpieces, it signals an unlooked-for
willingness among Victorian household-
ers to accommodate “queer” as a subset
of “quaint.” (Meanwhile, a letter and en-
graved portrait of the Chevalière d’Eon
serve to document the still less expected
accomodation of authority to gen-
der ambiguity: an eighteenth- century
French soldier, diplomat, and spy, d’Eon
officially lived forty-nine years as a man
and thirty-three as a woman.)
Baskin’s collection has extensive
holdings on race in America, including
important works by African-American
women such as Harriet Wilson’s 1859
novel Our Nig; or, Sketches from the
Life of a Free Black, Ida B. Wells’s 1893
pamphlet denouncing the exclusion of
“colored Americans” from the World’s
Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, and
Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer’s 1907
book of poems about rape, lynching, and
peonage under Jim Crow. Their words,
like those of Wheatley and Truth, ar-
ticulate a breadth of experiences and
understandings rarely represented in
American literature. The abolitionist
paraphernalia on view necessarily con-
densed such complexities to moralizing
messages designed to bring the point
home, sometimes literally. What are
we to make of the dessert plate printed
with antislavery verses and an image of
an African mother and child? Can we
imagine its abolitionist owners tucking
into a blancmange while reading “So
Christian Light dispels the gloom/That
shades poor Negro’s hapless doom”?
Or did the plate sit sequestered in
the china cupboard, virtue-signaling
across the dining room?
“Five Hundred Years” marks no di-
vision between political, economic, and
domestic life, since for women there
rarely was one. Women’s work was
almost never separable from family.
Obligation and opportunity (such as
it was) went hand in hand. This can be
seen in the biographies of women in the
printing and book trades: Jolande Bon-
homme, who produced the fine Book
of Hours (1546) in the exhibition, was
the daughter and wife of printers. In
colonial Annapolis, Anne Catherine
Green inherited a printshop from her
husband, and later went into partner-
ship with her son; included at the Gro-
lier was an $8 note she produced for the
colony of Maryland using an esoteric
anticounterfeiting process that cast
rel ief- pr i nti ng blocks f rom fou nd leaves
(the specific, inimitable irregularity of
the leaves would have been almost im-
possible to replicate by hand-cutting).
Geronima Parasole, who created
spare, robust woodcuts for Antonio
Agustín’s 1592 study of antiquities,
belonged to a Roman family of print-
makers and painters; her sister-in-law
Isabella (Elisabetta) Catanea Parasole
made exquisite lace-pattern woodcuts
(shown four years ago in the Metropol-
itan Museum’s “Fashion and Virtue:
Textile Patterns and the Print Revolu-
tion, 1520–1620”). One of the show’s
most entrancing artworks was Anna
Maria Vaiani’s engraving for Flora,overo, Cultura di fiori (1638), in which
the stalk of an umbellate narcissus
rises, solid as a lamppost, then breaks
out in a burst of muscular blooms. The
daughter of a Florentine painter and
engraver, Vaiani was in correspon-
dence with Galileo, and is herself the
subject of a magical, small engraving
by Claude Mellan. In the right circum-
stances, families enabled women to be
active participants in the artistic and
intellectual life of their time.By the nineteenth century, however,
such family operations were giving way
to academies and other professionalized
modes of training that sidelined women.
The Arts and Crafts movement presents
a particularly poignant example of this
shift: egalitarian, even socialist, in ori-entation, it sought to repair the alien-
ation of labor in industrialized societies
by championing traditional forms of
hand facture, many of them long prac-
ticed by women. In order to elevate the
social and intellectual standing of these
activities, organizations and schools
were founded—many of which refused
women (or as Charles Ashbee, founder
of the Guild and School of Handicraft
in London, put it, “the lady amateur”),
such that the women bookbinders in
Baskin’s collection had to seek out sepa-
rate venues to perfect their skills and ex-
hibit their work.^2 Making things for the
home could be seen as a kind of poten-
tially charming, undervalued neighbor-
hood of endeavor ripe for gentrification
(gent ification?) by men.
Undoubtedly, the greatest factor gov-
erning women’s lives until recently was
pregnancy, and Baskin’s collection is rich
with attempts to manage it. Centuries of
books on midwifery are complemented
by Margaret Sanger’s 1914 pamphlet
Family Limitation, an antique contra-
ceptive sponge in a kind of knitted snood,
and a delicately worded trade card from
around 1785 through which Mrs. Phillips
offers “machines, commonly called im-
plements of safety” or, more commonly
still, condoms. A lurid biography from
the end of the nineteenth century prom-
ises to tell all about “the most terrible
being ever born,” Madame Restell, who
became wealthy providing abortions in
New York and who, after being chargedunder the Comstock laws in 1878, slit
her throat before facing trial. And there
is the weirdly fascinating pocket ob-
stetrics model book (Geburtshilfliches
Taschenphantom) featuring an interac-
tive arrangement of pelvis, baby head,
and forceps—at once anatomically ac-
curate and trippily Dadaist in its bio-
mechanomorphism (think early Picabia
sharing space with Hannah Höch).
For most women, the facts of child-
bearing could not be separated from
the realities of child-rearing. Apart
from nuns, precious few women would
have led lives in which the supervision
of children was not an incessant real-
ity. Martha Maxwell had a daughter
and six stepchildren. Anne Catherine
Green ran her business while raising
six children and burying another eight.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi never marriedbut was responsible for teaching her
twenty full and half siblings.
Suffice it to say, undivided focus is a
luxury that women rarely enjoyed. This
is a fact, but is it always a liability? In A
Room of One’s Own, Woolf argued that
the eruption of female genius in early-
nineteenth-century novel-writing was
the result of middle-class households
having only one sitting room, since the
endless social interruptions that kept
women from pursuits such as writing
history also provided them with the ma-
terial and insights for writing fiction. A
corollary may be seen in the same era’s
proliferation of women writers of popu-
lar science. All that hand-holding and
learning to pitch one’s language at the
level of receiving ears could be put to
professional use in making intimidating
ideas approachable. The frontispiece of
Margaret Bryan’s 1799 Compendious
System of Astronomy shows the (very
comely) English author accompanied
by her telescope, armillary sphere, sex-
tant, globe, and two young daughters,
as if to say, “Nothing to fear here!”
(There was a neat counterpart to this
at the Grolier in the form of a French
schoolgirl’s captivating, hand-drawn
report on Ptolemaic and Copernican
astronomical models.)
The Irishwoman Mary Ward
(mother of eight) wrote and illustrated
Te l e s c ope Te a c h i ng s (1859) as well as
volumes on microscopy and entomol-
ogy by making “time for her scholarly
work after her children were in bed,”
the catalog notes. The artist and scien-
tist Orra White Hitchcock of Amherst
(mother of six) produced more than aAn obstetrics model book by Arthur Mueller, 1899Lisa Unger Baskin Collection /Rubenstein Library, Duke University(^2) Charles Ashbee, Craftsmanship in
Competitive Industry (Campden:
Essex House Press, 1908), p. 37.
mitpress.mit.edu/NYRB
New Books
from the MIT
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