Browse Items (149 total)

In this text, French humanist Marconville compiles examples from the past and present of the virtues and vices of women. Ultimately, he suspends judgement on whether women have an inborn predisposition to these various virtues and vices.

"Artist and engraver Claudine Brunand was likely related to the artist and woodcutter Michel Brunand. She worked for a number of printers and publishers in her native Lyon as well as in Germany. We know her for this charming, inventive, and…

Depicted in the image is a "mixed-gender" medical school class dissection. A group of medical students consisting of five males and 1 female examine a cadaver along with the professor. The image portrays the tension over female medical training in…

Trade Card advertising Mme. Demorest’s Reliable Patterns,
[New York, New York]: [ca. 1870-1900]

Bound in a lovely pink, gilt-edged and stamped glazed paper binding, schoolgirl Emma Lascal’s beautifully observed and sensitively drawn cosmography report summarizes the astronomical knowledge of her day. Nineteenth-century advances in the telescope…

Keenly observant entomologist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian was the first to study and depict the metamorphosis of insects in the field. She taught girls botanical drawing and sold her specimens, prints, and books to earn a living. Her first work,…

"English physician and natural philosopher Erasmus Darwin wrote this work at the urging of his two daughters, born from his relationship with Mary Parker and out of wedlock. They had sought his counsel on establishing a boarding school in 1794.…

"This pristine silk motor scarf was sold in London before the Women's Social and Political Union's “Woman’s Sunday” March on 21 June 1908. The government had challenged the suffrage movement to show numbers, and more than 250,000 activists traveled…