On December 11th, 2019, New York’s Grolier Club will open “Five Hundred Years of Women’s Work: The Lisa Unger Baskin Collection,” featuring over 200 items from Baskin’s 16,000+ archive focused on the hidden yet important world of women’s work. The free exhibition runs through February 8th, 2020.

For over 45 years, activist and collector Lisa Unger Baskin has collected manuscripts, ephemera, and objects related to women’s work, including Virginia Woolf’s writing desk and Charlotte Bronte’s needlepoint. Part of the collection includes trade cards illustrating women participating in a variety of professions including bookselling, bookbinding, musical instrument maker, layer-out of the dead, and corset-maker.

Baskin’s collection was aimed to expand and deepen understanding about what has historically constituted women’s work. In her collector’s statement, she says, “My response to the women’s movement, alongside my activism, was to collect and document the history that was hidden, not taught, and little written about. I had begun prying out evidence that women were working—indeed, had always been working—but the tracks marking their achievements were largely erased or obscured.”

Baskin’s collection was acquired by Duke University’s Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library in 2015, though Baskin continues to play an active role in its curation and scholarship while also continuing to expand its holdings.

The exhibition aligns with the year-long celebration of the passing of the 19th Amendment, notes Baskin. On display at the Grolier Club will be documents from enslaved women and a rare pamphlet by journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells called The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. “Part of my hope that the collection will be seen and used extensively; the exhibition website is without barriers, there is no paywall,” Baskin explains and that the exhibition will “make parallel statements about the time we are living in.”

Other objects on display include a 17th century letter from Florentine artist Artemisia Gentileschi, correspondence between suffragettes, “Sojourner Truth’s first account of her life,” and “the first obstetrical book by a woman, the 17th century Louise Bourgeois” according to a Grolier Club press release.

In an interview, Baskin explains that the Grolier Club was “the perfect venue” for the exhibition. The Grolier Club is the primary bibliophilic club in the United States and thus was the “logical and only place” for the collection to travel outside of Duke University. Moreover, it was important to Baskin that the exhibition be open and free to the public.

On January 21st, 2020, the Grolier Club will hold a symposium “Women in the Book Arts” from 9:30am - 4:30pm. Speakers will include keynote speaker Dr. Nell Irvin Painter, Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University, and speaker, Ann Gordon, editor of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony Papers Project.

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Elisa Shoenberger is a historian, journalist, and curator. She has published articles at the Boston Globe, the Rumpus, Deadspin, Syfy, Inside Philanthropy, and other outlets. She is a regular contributor to Book Riot and is the co-editor and co-founder of The Antelope: A Journal of Oral History and Mayhem.