Raising Funds in the 1880s to Educate Child-Widows in India

In the late 1880s, Ramabai Sarasvati (1858-1922) lectured in the United States on the plight of child-widows in India. In mid-December 1887, the Ramabai Association was organized, to support an education program for them. The following year, Ramabai produced a book, The High-caste Hindu Woman, to be sold to American women to raise money for her program. Rachel L. Bodley, the dean of Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, wrote the introduction—giving special emphasis to Woman’s Med graduate Anandi Gopal Joshi (1865-1887), who had been the first Hindu woman to obtain the degree of Doctor of Medicine. Joshi unfortunately had died of TB soon after her return to India. In the book, Joshi serves as a stellar example the sort of achievement possible for future Indian women—when given educational opportunities. Ramabai’s and Joshi’s portraits were produced by the Philadelphia firm of Frederick Gutekunst to illustrate the text.

- Connie King, Chief of Reference and Curator of Women’s History

Ramabai Sarasvati, 1858-1922. The high-caste Hindu woman. Published Philadelphia: : [s.n.], 1888.

Our copy of Lydia Howard Sigourney’s The Weeping Willow (Hartford, 1847) is bound in a striped cloth that nearly obscures the blind-blocked decorative border on the cover. #PublishersBindingThursday

Sigourney, L. H. Hartford : Henry H. Parsons. 1847.    

Join us next Thursday evening, March 14, for Profiles of 19th-Century Women in Science, a lecture by Dr. Jessica C. Linker.    

Dr. Linker will speak on women’s scientific practice in the nineteenth century, which benefited from the proliferation of female academies, as well as the popular sentiment that women should use science in their everyday lives. 

This talk draws from the careers of Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, one of the most prolific scientific authors of the century, Lucy Way Sistare Say, the first woman to become a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, who taught geology to African American students in Philadelphia with the aim of bolstering abolitionist narratives. 

Free and open to the public. Register today!    

George Albert Lewis, The Old Houses and Stores With Memorabilia Relating to Them and My Father and Grandfather (Philadelphia, 1900). Gift of Oliver E. Allen.

G. Albert Lewis (1829-1915) compiled his family history into an album, illustrating it with magnificent watercolors, photographs, and ephemera. Depicted here is the parlor of his parents’ home on South 2nd Street, where they lived from 1824 to 1840. He wrote that “the parlors of this house were very handsome– the front being in red and yellow–with white and gold paint except the doors, while the ceiling was light blue.” Notice the Empire-style chairs, sofa, and the pier table with lion’s paw feet.

See this and more in our current exhibition: Stylish Books: Designing Philadelphia Furniture on display through April 26, 2019.

Well now we know how “handy” port wine boxes can be in a pinch…

Mummy’s Hand. “Woman’s Hand taken from an Egyptian Mummy: presented to the Library Company of Philadelphia by Mr. Benjamin West fomerly of this City, but now of London - Historical Painter - Novemr. 1767.”

Over the next five weeks, we will be highlighting articles by five different Library Company fellows featured in a special “Keywords” issue of Early American Studies (University of Pennsylvania Press, Fall 2018).

First in this series is Jessica C. Linker’s article, “Technology”, which takes a close look at the women and technologies essential to creating the colored plates in Jacob Bigelow’s American Medical Botany (Boston, 1817). 

#LCPFellowFriday

Datura stramonium b [graphic]. From Jacob Bigelow, American medical botany. [Boston]: [Cummings and Hilliard] [1817]

This comic valentine is anything but a sweet token of affection, but we at the Library Company love its rhyming barbs, especially since they aren’t directed at us. 

Man Crossed in Love. [S.l. : s.n.] [between 1840 and 1880?]

In January 2019, Zachary M. Schrag, a professor in George Mason University’s Department of History and Art History, examined a range of 19th-century nativist material in the Library Company’s collections. One item in particular—an issue of a short-lived and little-known Philadelphia newspaper— proved especially relevant to his research. 

Read Professor Schrag’s views on why the Native Flag, especially its front-page engraving, offers new insight into how Philadelphia nativists understood themselves and their opponents in 1844, the year of the city’s nativist riots, on the Library Company blog.

Black Migrations, a mini exhibition curated by our African American History Subject Specialist and Reference Librarian, Jasmine Smith, showcases the impact of World War I and the Great Migration and how it transformed black identity and black entrepreneurship. See these images and more on display now through March 29, 2019. 

Pancoast, Charles R., b. 1858 photographer. [Canning and preserving at demonstration center at Little Wakefield, Germantown] C.R. Pancoast, Philadelphia, ca. 1918.

True blue. Chicago: E. G. Renesch, 1919.

Wilson, G. Mark (George Mark), d. 1925, photographer. 2nd and Brown St. A stevedore, a family. ca. 1923.

[African American worker at a work site near the Trenton Elevated Railroad Bridge in Philadelphia.] ca. 1918.

Our copy of Clarence Cook’s The House Beautiful (New York, 1878) includes this gold-stamped illustration of a young woman reading on a chaise longue by a fireplace… #goals 

#MacroMonday

Cook, Clarence. The house beautiful : essays on beds and tables, stools and candlesticks. New York : Scribner, Armstrong and Co. 1878.