To celebrate Women’s History Month, this guide features some of the items on view in the Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures that demonstrate the barriers women have broken and spaces they have made for themselves in the arts, sciences, literature, politics, and more through innovation, creativity, and advocacy. The items here highlight women of color, queer women, abolitionists, suffragists, feminists (and proto-feminists), thinkers, pioneers, and icons whose contributions revolutionized and redefined their fields and society at large. These represent only a portion of the objects on display in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, presented loosely in the order in which they are organized in the Polonsky Exhibition.

• The “Goddard Broadside” printing of the Declaration of Independence
• Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft
• Handwritten manuscript draft of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• Berenice Abbott’s photograph of penicillin mold
• Natalia Goncharova’s costume design for Les Noces

  

• Theatrical posters of Sarah Bernhardt by Alphonse Mucha
• Costume worn by Loie Fuller
• Harriet, The Moses of Her People
• Maya Angelou’s handwritten draft of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• Postcards to Susan B. Anthony from U.S. Senators concerning the Nineteenth Amendment

  

• The “Colored Women Voters” headquarters in Georgia
• Flyer for Marian Anderson at Carnegie Hall
• The Ladder: A Lesbian Review
• Elizabeth Catlett’s Political Prisoner
• Segvndo volvmen de las obras de Soror Jvana Ines de la Cruz (Second volume of the works of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz)

  

• Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
• Virginia Woolf’s walking stick
• Letter from Leonard Woolf to Vita Sackville-West concerning Virginia Woolf’s death
• Page from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s manuscript draft of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Letter from Mary Wollstonecraft to Catharine Macaulay

  

• Charlotte Brontë’s writing desk
• Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
• Portraits of Maritcha Lyons and her younger sister Pauline
• Umbrella belonging to the author of Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers
• Recording from Amelia Earhart’s International Broadcast in London

Reserve your timed tickets to see these objects and more in the Polonsky Exhibition, on view at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.