Mildly Reserved

Portrait of a Young Woman, 1970, Leonor Fini

It’s warm enough to wear dresses again!!!!!

Materials relating to the women’s rights movement form a major collecting focus here in the Hargrett Library.  Most of our women’s rights collections are part of the Lucy Hargrett Draper Center for the Study of the Rights of Women in History and Law. The Draper Center collections are comprised of primary and secondary materials in a variety of formats with an emphasis on documenting women’s rights, especially the United States and British Women’s Suffrage Movements (1840-1920).  While the emphasis is on collections relating to the leaders of this movement, other materials relate to the suffrage movement in the United States, such as postcards, photographs, government documents and periodicals. In addition, supporting materials recognize some of the leaders of the abolition movement, including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth, each of whom spoke up on behalf of women’s rights as well as against slavery. Moreover, to place the suffrage materials in historical context the collection also includes pre-suffrage treatise on women’s rights and legal documents dating to the 16th century as well as materials related to post-suffrage efforts (1921-2000) to pass the ERA, the formation of N.O.W., the women’s liberation movement, and the Pro-Choice movement. These materials are open to the public for research and study; the finding aid is browsable through our website.  We annually present an exhibit of materials from this collection exploring various aspects of the women’s rights movement.  This year’s exhibit, ‘Equality Under the Law: History of the Equal Rights Amendment’, is currently on display in our gallery space in the Russell Special Collections Libraries Building. 

Madelynn Furlong

Cynthia MacAdams, Self-Portrait, 1978

Frida Kahlo, New Mexico, 1951 © Gisèle Freund

Frida Kahlo

International Women’s day.

Happy Women’s Day to all you fabulous ladies out there! Stay awesome!

Kim Addonizio (via withnailrules)

Kim  Addonizio, from ‘For Desire’ (via soracities)

Kim Addonizio, from “Stolen Moments,” What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems (W. W. Norton & Company, 2005)                           (via metaphorformetaphor)

Zora Neale Hurston was confident, charismatic, and determined to be extraordinary.As a young woman, Hurston lived and wrote alongside such prominent authors as Langston Hughes and Alain Locke during the Harlem Renaissance. But unfortunately, despite writing the luminary work Their Eyes Were Watching God, she was always short of money. Though she took odd jobs as a housemaid and as the personal assistant to an actress, Zora often found herself in abject poverty. Through it all, Zora kept writing. And though none of her books sold more than a thousand copies while she was alive, she was rediscovered a decade later by a new generation of readers, who knew they had found an important voice of American Literature.

Black Heritage Stamps with Ella Fitzgerald, Hattie McDaniel, Madam C.J. Walker, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Bessie Coleman, Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Marian Anderson, Shirley Chisholm.