March is Women’s History Month, a time to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of women across time and space. We bring Women’s History Month to a close with this roundup of representations of and works by women in our Digital Collections. Explore and be inspired.  

This post was compiled through contributions from the NYPL Labs and development teams, thanks especially to Ashley Blewer and Shana Kimball. Please let us know if you have any additions in the comments!

History

Selected digitized portions of the Schwimmer-Lloyd Collection feature photographs of feminists and suffragists from the papers of Rosika Schwimmer. The papers document her career as a suffragist, feminist, pacifist, world government advocate and Hungarian diplomat. A large selection of the featured photographs pertain to the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) Congresses. Correspondents include hundreds of notable Americans and Europeans such as Jane Addams, Anita Augspurg, Emily G. Balch, Mary R. Beard, Carrie Chapman Catt, Albert Einstein, Lida Gustava Heymann, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Aletta Jacobs, Alice Paul, Anna Howard Shaw, Baroness Bertha von Suttner, and Count Michael Karolyi.

From the Lewis Hine documentary collection, this portion of the collection is specifically about documenting "women at work" from 1905-1939.

We have a collection on the subject of women joining the World War I war effort in France and a collection featuring women at work during World War II.

"In Motion: The African American Migration Experience" is a sweeping 500-year historical narrative from the transatlantic slave trade to the Western migration, the colonization movement, the Great Migration, and the contemporary immigration of Caribbeans, Haitians, and sub-Saharan Africans. Digitized in support of this website, Noted Negro women: their triumphs and activities features portraits of famous African American women and Work of colored women; compiled by Jane Olcott, issued by the Colored Work Committee, War Work Council, National Board Young Women's Christian Associations features African American women at work and participating in the YWCA.

Prints

Printing Women is an exhibition open until the end of May at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Digital surrogates of much of the collection are available in the Digital Collections.

Prints from printmaker and painter Mary Cassatt are available in the Samuel Putnam Avery Collection.

Photography

Martha Swope was the preeminent female photographer of theater/dance in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s in a field dominated by men.

Diana Davies and Kay Tobin were photographers who documented the civil rights movement of gays and lesbians during the 1960s and ‘70s.

From 1929-38, Berenice Abbott photographed urban material culture and the built environment of New York, documenting the old before it was torn down and recording new construction.

Cynthia MacAdams documented actresses and icons of the 1970s in Emergence and the down and out sights of the Bowery of the 1970s and ‘80s.

Alice Austen grew up in Staten Island and captured everyday life with her camera in New York City at the turn of the 20th century: messenger boys, street sweepers, organ grinders, and peddlers. More at What a Woman Can Do With a Camera: The Photography of Alice Austen.

Florence Vandamm and the Vandamm Studio took some of the best known photographs of performance from 1908-1962. Learn the stories behind the portraits and production shots from Suffrage theater in London to Broadway's golden age, with stops in Hollywood, experimental dance and fashion on the way.

Dance

We have featured many collections from our Jerome Robbins Dance Division that happen to cover the history of women and dance. Of note are the Isadora Duncan collection and this bonus collection of illustrations featuring Isadora Duncan. Ruth St. Denis and others are featured in the Denishawn Collections. Loie Fuller, Doris Humphrey, Ruth Page, Anna Pavlova, Flore Revalles, and many more are featured  within the Photograph Collections. If you're in New York, the Library of Performing Arts has the Janis Brenner video archive available for streaming.

Literature

We have over 200 pictures of Gertrude Stein taken by her literary executor, Carl Van Vechten, who later donated his collections to the library.

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was an American artist and writer, and the wife of the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, and we have a collection of her papers.

Additionally, Digital Collections holds a variety of digitized materials on many women authors, including but not limited to: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Edna St. Vincent Millay,  Virginia Woolf,  Lorraine Hansberry, Dorothy Parker, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adrienne Rich, Mary Shelley, Willa Cather, and Ayn Rand.

Maya Angelou (as a performer in a Jean Genet production from 1961)

Bonus “Firsts”

Two pictures in our collections feature Ada Lovelace, attributed as the first computer programmer!

These cyanotypes of British algae taken by Anna Atkins are considered to be the first published photographic work by a woman.