Six pamphlets, each detailed in its own entry.
(Sewall, May Wright). Small Archive of Six Pamphlets. [Various]; [1887-1895]. An archive of six pamphlets which reflect significant aspects of the work of this women’s rights and suffrage pioneer, including two pamphlets owned by Susan B. Anthony (and subsequently given to the Library of Congress as part of her library) and three owned by May Wright Sewall (and subsequently given to the Library of Congress by her literary executor Mrs. Ida Harper Husted). In effect, the archive documents major developments in the women’s rights movement during this period.
a) Sewall, May Wright. Pamphlet: The Domestic and Social Effects of the Higher Education of Women. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Western Association of Collegiate Alumnae, [1887].
5-3/4 x 8-5/8”; 22 pp.; printed self-wrappers (stapled); library of Congress stamp at front cover and surplus/duplicate stamp at rear cover; 1-1/2” closed tear to rear cover; covers dusty; lower foretip lacking at front cover and first leaf; wrappers splitting along lower spine. A fragile item, but the interior is fresh and nice; about very good.
Susan B. Anthony’s copy with her ownership stamp at the inside cover.
As principal of the Girls' Classical School in Indianapolis (and a graduate of Northwestern University), May Wright Sewall addresses the impact of education on women. A higher or collegiate education is necessarily “liberal” education and as the phrase would seem to imply affords the “student a liberalizing or a liberating experience.” She points out that the arguments against advanced education for women have arisen from the belief that education “would give women a distaste for the pleasures of domestic life, and would disqualify them for their duties in both the family and society.” In fact, Sewall thinks lack of education all too often has warped women’s judgment with ill-effects on their families. Education, moreover, affords women the means to support themselves so that marriage may be a choice rather than a necessity: “As a class, women are so trammeled by precedent, prejudice, fashion, social conventions and narrow experience; as a class, they are so encased in their own emotional environment, that intellectual liberty is, perhaps their only certain path to intelligent free-will...” Her dedication to education for women and her vision of women no longer fettered by ignorance struck a sympathetic chord for Susan B. Anthony. Miss Anthony herself had been a teacher and considered, as did Elizabeth Cady Stanton, education a necessity for women. Sewall twice served as president of the Western Association of Collegiate Alumnae, a forerunner of the American Association of University Women. (OCLC records one location.)
(formerly #4977)
b) Sewall, May Wright. Pamphlet: Women as Educators, Mrs. May Wright Sewall Read at the Fifteenth Annual Congress of the Association for the Advancement of Women, at New York, October, 1887. Fall River, Mass.: J.H. Franklin & Co., Publishers and Printers, 1888. With Susan B. Anthony ownership stamp at the inside cover.
5-3/4 x 8-1/2”; 14 pp.; printed buff wrappers (sewn); some mild overall dustiness; lower foretip of first page lacking; wrappers fragile with splitting along fold; crease along center; lower foretip of front cover detached; Library of Congress stamp (faint) at front cover and surplus stamp (duplicate) at rear cover; about very good.
Mrs. Sewall describes the “glass ceiling” in education. In 1873, Jane C. Croly, cofounder of Sorosis, convened a meeting to establish a new organization, the Association for the Advancement of Women. Some four hundred women answered her invitation to attend the organization’s first meeting in New York. The purpose of the AAW was to support women in education and to encourage their entry into professions. Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, Frances Willard and Mary Livermore undertook leadership roles; others such as Ednah Dow Cheney, Catharine Beecher, Maria Mitchell and Antoinette Blackwell were import
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