Naturalist Martha Maxwell, shown in one of her signature lifelike tableaus around 1879. Credit: Rubenstein Library, Duke University

Society USA6. February 2020

Woman Collects Books by Women for 45 Years – Now Honored By Exhibition in New York

A female curator of rare books in the U.S. noticed back in the 60’s that women were not getting their fair share of recognition for their works – so she decided to start a collection of her own.

Lisa Unger Baskin, herself in the minority of a white-male-dominated world, has spent the last 45 years collecting and celebrating women’s history and contributions in medicine, literature, civil rights and science, among other fields. Around 200 of the books, letters, journals and artifacts she gathered are featured in “Five Hundred Years of Women’s Work: The Lisa Unger Baskin Collection”, exhibited at Manhattan’s Grolier Club.

Whether today famous or forgotten, all of the women had, at some point, their stories untold, which Baskin explains is what ultimately led her “to focus on unearthing the histories of ordinary women—women who worked every day without recognition or acknowledgment”.

The exhibition, aimed at recognizing 500 years of women’s intellectual contributions, shows only a fraction of the 11,000 items gathered within less than five decades. The rest resides at Duke University, which has owned the feminist collection since 2015.

Source:
Smithsonian

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