Living My Life, vol. 1. With an ALS to Mr. Titus.
Inscribed To Women’s Health Activist Josephine Baker
With A Letter To Publisher Edward Titus
Goldman, Emma. Living My Life. Volume One. New York: Knopf, 1931.
8vo.; photographic frontispiece; other photographs throughout; blue cloth, covers worn, spine faded; internally bright.
Boxed together in a quarter-morocco slipcase with:
Autograph letter signed “Emma Goldman,“ to “Dear Mr. Titus”; St. Tropez, 2 September, 1929; three 8 1/2 x 11” sheets; letter written on rectos only; small damp-stain to top edge of all pages, not affecting text.
First edition of the first volume of Goldman’s autobiography, Living My Life, arguably her most-read work; together with an unpublished autograph letter from Goldman to publisher Edward Titus.
The first edition is a significant association copy, inscribed by Goldman to Dr. Josephine Baker, pioneering women’s health activist: Dr. Josephine Baker. In profound admiration for your great work for the children of America. Emma Goldman...March 1932. The inscription leaf has been tipped into the book at the front endpaper.
Dr. Josephine Baker—not to be confused with the singer of the same name—was an early feminist and a lifelong fighter for better health care for poor Americans, for women, and for children. She was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1873. Her mother was a member of the earliest student body at Vassar College; another relative, Samuel Danforth, helped found Harvard. Baker’s hopes of attending Vassar were crushed when her father died, leaving the family virtually penniless: instead of attending a liberal arts college, Baker was forced to embark upon a career. She boldly picked an unusual profession for a woman of her day—medicine.
After studying at the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, where her co-worker was Dr. Emily Blackwell, Elizabeth’s sister, Baker graduated with honors. In 1901 she took a job as a medical inspector for the New York City Health Department, kicking off her career in public service:
As she searched the West Side of Manhattan for ailing Irish and black babies or sought to handle the health problems of indigents on the Lower East Side, the ‘odds and ends of experience began to take form’ in her eyes. She was shocked by the ‘ancient scandal’ of the hygienically dangerous tenement dwellings crowded with immigrants. Her work in the slums sealed her commitment to public health. (AR, pp. 41-42).
Baker was the founder and the first director of the child hygiene division of the New York City Health Department, “the first such agency in the world to be funded by public taxation” (ibid.). As head of this path-finding agency Baker instituted the first preventative health measures for New York City’s children. She wrote many books, including Healthy Babies, Healthy Mothers, and Healthy Children (1920), The Growing Child (1923), and Child Hygiene (1925). She also served as the president of several important public health associations, including the Babies Welfare Association (later the Children’s Welfare Federation of New York), the American Child Health Association, and the American Medical Women’s Association. Baker, a longtime feminist, joined the College Women’s Equal Suffrage League in 1908, spoke on street corners for the suffrage cause, and was part of a representative women’s rights group that met with President Wilson at the White House. She associated with the more radical elements of the suffrage movement, including Crystal Eastman, Rose Pastor Stokes, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and, of course, Goldman herself.
In the three page letter, Goldman turns to publisher Edward Titus, a fellow American exile, for advice on a potential non-English version of her book in progress. In part:
Dear Mr. Titus... I am asking Mr. [Alexander] Berkman to take this to you to expedite the response. Perhaps you have heard that I am at work on an autobiography. I already have an important American publisher who is
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