![]() ![]() The women's movement and my compelling interest in these untold stories ultimately directed my passion to help fill in the history of ordinary women-women who worked every day without recognition or acknowledgement. Women's history and black history are tightly woven together both are hidden and rarely taught in schools. As a young person, I had been radicalized as an adult, I have continued working to achieve a more just and equitable world. I was elected a delegate to the Democratic Convention in 1988 pledged to the Rev. Later, the strains of my activism combined as I organized and co-chaired the Western Massachusetts Rainbow Coalition. I supported Eugene McCarthy's 1968 presidential campaign. My own civil disobedience was first in response to the Vietnam War. At age thirteen, I was influenced by adults returning from the Freedom Rides and voting rights campaigns in the South. The anti-war and civil rights movements were part of my growing up in the 1950s. The core of the collection was, and is, social history. In the 1960s, I actively began collecting things relating to women. His small watercolor cards at Christmas and birthdays that always accompanied gifts of books, manuscripts, or objects would often depict a woman at a printing press or in her bindery-reflecting his understanding of what I was about in collecting the myriad stories of women. It gave him enormous satisfaction to find treasure for me. The part that my husband Leonard Baskin played as I formed my collection is without measure. I bought Maria Sibylla Merian's De europische insecten (Amsterdam, 1730) around 1966. ![]() In the mid-nineteen sixties, we were collecting early illustrated books, among them some printed or illustrated by women. My growing collection of Käthe Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn-Becker prints, for example. There were, however, things that were sacrosanct. We sold our emblem books, color printing, Goltzius collection, Mocha ware and chiaroscuro woodcuts. Our pockets were not as deep as our passion for stuff, and we often sold some things to allow us to acquire others. We collected medals and plaquettes, Mocha ware, rewards of merit, ephemera, and early illustrated books as well as chiaroscuro woodcuts, color printing, Rudolf Bresdin and Hendrik Goltzius, the d'Agotys, Altdorfer, model books, and ornament prints-all of these things that were not yet particularly sought after by others and not yet expensive. That experience, though brief, opened a door to the historical importance of collecting I interpreted it in a personal way.īy the mid-sixties my husband and I were collecting, both together and individually. While an undergraduate at Cornell I was exposed to special collections. I was not content borrowing books from the public library-those books had to be returned. Shelved from floor to ceiling, my books were neatly arranged. The book closet in my bedroom on East Nineteenth Street and Glenwood Road in Brooklyn was a repository for the books, papers, and ephemera that I was gathering (though I did not yet know the word ephemera). I suppose there must have been a time when I didn't collect something, but I really don't remember one. ![]()
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