“No gate, no lock, no bolt” Exhibition
RARE / Glenn Horowitz Bookseller
This event has ended.
As part of our ongoing focus on the myriad accomplishments of women, RARE is honored to present “No gate, no lock, no bolt”: The Dobkin Family Collection of Feminist History, an exhibition of items from this remarkable collection of archival material—unparalleled in private hands—specially chosen to support Virginia Woolf’s ringing pronouncement in A Room of One’s Own: “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
The Dobkin Family Collection, built over a quarter-century by New York philanthropist Barbara Dobkin, was designed to uncover and preserve exceptional historical material—original letters and manuscripts, as well as rare printed pieces—that would aid in research and writing on the history of women’s advancements. It currently houses thousands of items which chronicle women’s experience—private and public, individual and aggregate—in such political and domestic realms as gender equality, suffrage, birth control, labor, education, the military, science, medicine, business, and literature.
Among the dozens of spectacular items on display—many making their public debut—will be:
the Proceedings of the women’s convention in Seneca Falls, NY, in 1848—marking the beginning of the universal suffrage movement in the United States.
Margaret Sanger’s manuscript notebook for Family Limitation, the foundational birth control work for which she was prosecuted for obscenity.
the logbook for visitors to the lighthouse that inspired Virginia Woolf to write To the Lighthouse, signed by Woolf as a girl.
a letter from Amelia Earhart—on Cosmopolitan letterhead naming her as their Aviation Editor—to her mechanics instructor, together with a photo of her with her classmates from that early rare training program for women.
diplomas of one of the earliest minted female doctors in the United States, and of one of the earliest female graduates of CUNY.
an Anne Frank archive with material dating to the original publication of both Diary of a Young Girl and Tales from the House Behind, including her father’s original typescript of the collection of stories with four stories that did not appear in the first edition.
letters by Eleanor Roosevelt on anti-Semitism, Nazis, the war, and FDR’s policies.
Simone de Beauvoir’s working manuscript for The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe).
a 3-page handwritten letter by Harper Lee containing an anecdote about her home town, the model for the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird.
letters and manuscript material by Jackie Kennedy, Margaret Fuller, Sylvia Plath, Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton, Jane Addams (the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize), Pearl Buck (the second American woman to win the Nobel for Literature), Hannah Arendt, Emmeline Pankhurst (leader of the movement for women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom, portrayed by Meryl Streep in the upcoming film The Suffragette), and much more!
Media
Schedule
from October 14, 2015 to October 24, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-10-14 from 18:00 to 20:00