PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPH OF
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
SIGNED BY HER ON TWO SEPARATE OCCASIONS

A portrait photograph of author, social reformer, and philosopher Charlotte Perkins Gilman, signed on the verso just before she became “the leading intellectual in the women’s movement,” as well as on the image itself, after her second marriage (Degler). This portrait of Charlotte Perkins Gilman—initially signed just six months before.....

A GOLD MINER’S WIFE WRITES HOME
FROM YANKEE HILL, CALIFORNIA, 1859

An evocative letter documenting domestic and dream life in a small California gold-mining town by a woman who ventured from Kentucky to California with her miner husband. Born in Livingston, Kentucky, Lovina Terry Padon Barnes (1833–1916) married Thomas Bartholomew Barnes Jr. (1830–1905) in 1853, and sometime before 1859 they moved.....

SOUTH CAROLINA WIDOW SEEKS SUPPORT
FOR HER SHORT-LIVED SCHOOL
AS CHARLESTON COMES TO LIFE AFTER THE WAR

A letter by a Southern Catholic widow soliciting support for her school for young women, written soon after the Civil War and shortly before she joined a convent. Addressed to her student “Mary,” this letter written by schoolmistress Adeline Brisbane begs that “your Mother, & Self, will use your influence.....

A DISABLED MOTHER FROM BUFFALO, NY
TOURS EUROPE

Two journals—with original photos and clippings—containing unusually intelligent and descriptive accounts of the tourist experience in Western Europe just after the turn of the century, written by a meticulously observant disabled woman traveling with her husband and adult daughters. The tour recorded in these journals takes Aurilla Fenton, her husband.....

A YOUNG MISSIONARY WOMAN IN JAVA
WRITES HOME TO SOUTH DAKOTA, 1913–18

A sheaf of letters by a young missionary from South Dakota, primarily written from Java to her family over the course of five years, describing the scene there as well as her teaching, language-learning, and health (including surgery and a bout with typhoid), and containing regular references to World War.....

A PENNSYLVANIA QUAKER GIRL’S REGISTER
OF HER FELLOW STUDENTS, 1803

An early manuscript register of students written by a girl attending what would become the longest operating boarding school in the United States, including two sisters apparently absent from the school’s official history. Anna Thomas, who was among the first 250 girls to enroll at Westtown School, “which commenced 5th.....