Post contributed by Mattison Bond, Coordinator, Movement History Initiative
Photo of Worth Long taken from SNCClegacyproject.org
On May 8, 2025 Worth Westinghouse Long Jr., Folklorist and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (also known as SNCC) Veteran passed away. The Franklin Research Center and Rubenstein Library mourns this lost and remembers his contributions as not only an activist, but also as a cultural archivist and true Durham native.
Worth Long’s Alabama State Police file, undated, Alabama Photographs and Pictures Collection, ADAH. Photo found at https://snccdigital.org/people/worth-long/
Long joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1963, organizing in Selma, Alabama, during a pivotal time in the Civil Rights Movement. He would later become a nationally recognized folklorist, committed to preserving and celebrating Black cultural traditions. His work with the Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Library of Congress helped amplify the voices, music, and stories of Black communities across the South.
A proud son of Durham’s Hayti community, Long’s legacy bridges activism and cultural memory. We are grateful for his life and his enduring contributions to justice and history.
Civil Rights History Project Interview completed by the Southern Oral History Program under contract to the Smithsonian Institution ’s National Museum of African American History & Culture and the Library of Congress, 2015 https://www.crmvet.org/nars/long_w.pdf
Ah-ha! I haven’t been stopped yet as I continue my series on the Woolworth sit-ins (both in Greensboro and Durham) and Duke’s ties to civil rights movements in the early 1960s. I have finally moved forward in time, jumping from 1960 all the way to…1964.
In 1964, we see some Duke faculty get involved in the Civil Rights movement, this time, integrating a restaurant just a few miles down the road (near that…other university) in Chapel Hill. Professors Peter Klopfer, Robert Osborn, and Frederick Herzog, along with a young Black student, sat in the Watts Grill in Chapel Hill. In what started as a simple protest would later include Klan activity, and would even turn into a court case on trespassing, a case that would later go to the Supreme Court.
I’ll let Peter Klopfer describe the court case further, here:
And finally, highlighting some of the great finds from the archives, is a copy of the subpoena so graciously gifted to Robert Osborn, Harmon Smith, Frederick Herzog, and Peter Klopfer, found in the Robert Osborn papers.
The Hartman Center and the Rubenstein Library are pleased to announce the arrival of the records of Hammacher Schlemmer, the 177-year-old hardware merchants-turned-purveyors of unique, odd, and oddly practical items, sold through a variety of catalogs that themselves represent one of the historical high points of creativity in catalog design and direct-to-consumer merchandising. The company produced its first catalog in 1881 and is considered the oldest catalog-based retail company in the United States, pre-dating Sears and Montgomery Ward by several years.
Hammacher Schlemmer began as a supplier of tools and trade equipment in 1848 in the Bowery section of New York by Charles Tollner. In 1853 he hired a 12-year-old German immigrant, William Schlemmer, as an assistant. A few years later another German immigrant, Albert Hammacher, invested in the growing hardware store. Eventually Schlemmer bought Tollner’s stake in the company, and in 1883 the company was renamed Hammacher Schlemmer & Co., a name it maintained for a century and a half.
Originally Hammacher Schlemmer sold primarily tools, from files and saws to more complicated machinery like the Lougee hair picker (a cotton gin-like machine for combing horsehair used in upholstery stuffing). By the 1900s the company had expanded to offer specialized tools for automotive, piano-building, and other trades; in the 1930s the company began to transition from hardware to housewares and general retail merchandise.
Hammacher Schlemmer maintained a store in the Bowery (and later branched to Chicago and Los Angeles), but an increasing percentage of sales came from its catalog operation. In the early days the catalogs doubled as selling aids for sales agents. They developed a reputation for detailed, useful print and finely rendered line drawings, as seen in this catalog entry for the Lougee hair picker:
With the transition to household goods (kitchen gadgets, furniture, cleaning implements and the like; a separate catalog for gourmet food products began in the 1930s) the catalog layouts shifted from line drawings to black-and-white (and later, color) photography. The catalogs for the centennial years 1947-1948 featured whimsical pastel drawings in color. By 1977 the catalogs would shift to an all-color layout.
The hardware line was dropped in the mid-1950s, and Hammacher Schlemmer turned to feature more high-end luxury goods, curated from other manufacturers’ items, as well as those developed by its own subsidiary, Invento, which was established in 1962. In 1983, the company established another subsidiary, Hammacher Schlemmer Institute, that focused on product testing and comparisons among competing products (similar to testing performed by groups such as Consumer Reports), later adding a Consumer Testing Panel for end-user testing and evaluation. In 1986, Hammacher Schlemmer began online sales in addition to its mail-order catalog operation. It joined SkyMall in 1991 as a charter member, advertising its products to airline passengers on U.S. domestic and selected international routes.
The catalogs featured a wild variety of products at every price point: slipper socks ($34.95); a walking stick with a built-in telescope ($89.95); a single-serving coffee maker ($199.95); a bamboo Tiki bar ($499.95); a leather chair in the shape of a baseball glove ($6,200); a full-scale working replica of the original 1966 Batmobile ($200,000); and a two-person fully functional electric submarine ($1.5 million). These products lived side-by-side in the page layouts of the catalog, a million-dollar submersible or a $65,000 robot next to entries for compression socks, garden hoses, and pens.
Along the way, Hammacher Schlemmer was instrumental in introducing a number of household items that started out as novelties and moved into mainstream popularity: pop-up toasters (1931); electric shavers (1934); steam irons (1948); telephone answering machines (1968); Mr. Coffee (1973); and the Cuisinart (1977), to name a few. Hammacher Schlemmer’s status as an American cultural icon is evidenced through parodies of the company’s catalog offerings that appeared in places such as the pages of Readers Digest and on the Family Guy television cartoon.
The Hammacher Schlemmer records should be available for researchers in the Rubenstein Library by late 2025. The collection offers a rich resource for scholars interested in topics as varied as advertising history; direct marketing; catalog design; line art; and the evolution of a historically important American retail establishment.
Post contributed by Madeline Huh, Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Intern.
As this year’s Trent History of Medicine Intern, I was given the exciting opportunity to curate an exhibit for the Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Room. I’m pleased to say that my exhibit, entitled “Defiant Bodies: Discourses on Intersex, 1573-2003,” is now open to the public in the Rubenstein Library. The exhibit explores changing dialogues around nonbinary sex and intersex identity over six centuries, from early modern medicine to 21st-century activism and (some of) the many interdisciplinary representations in between. There is also an online version of the exhibit, which you can explore here.
Thank you to all who have helped me during the process of creating this exhibit, especially Rachel Ingold, Meg Brown, Yoon Kim, and Grace Zayobi–I am very grateful for all your feedback along the way and your consistent willingness to engage in discussion with me on this complicated and important topic with such sensitivity.
“Defiant Bodies” will be on view from May 13, 2025 to October 4, 2025 in the Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Room. I am so very excited for you to explore it in-person and online!
Post contributed by Will Clemmons, Duke Family Processing & Digitization Intern.
Figure 1: Arranging a subset of photographs donated to the Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans family papers.
When I visited Duke in 2018 with my family, this time to give my younger brother the opportunity to explore the possibilities of life at a top university, I never imagined that I would end up being the one in my family to play a part in this university’s history. Tar Heel basketball has always had my family’s support, but we never disrespected Duke. At the time of the tour, I was trying my best to avoid going on the traditional college route myself, and I certainly was not envisioning a future where I would be pursuing a master’s degree as a Tar Heel. But our best laid plans do not always work out in the way we envision them, often leading to paths far greater than we could imagine. I thus found myself in the summer of 2023 moving to UNC Chapel Hill to pursue a master’s degree in library science, with an emphasis in archiving, pursuing goals I never dreamed were possible.
I knew going into this Duke internship that I would enjoy the job of a processing archivist, but I did not know just how specialized the position was, as the Duke Family Processing & Digitization Intern. My past archival internships/volunteer work had been at smaller institutions that often had a solo archivist. Working with such a small staff meant the hats my bosses would wear, and would pass on to me, spanned the breadth of jobs an archivist can perform, from accessioning to processing, digitizing to describing. At Duke, I was tasked with only processing collections in the fall with Rubenstein Technical Services and digitizing collections in the spring, both tasks I had done before, but not at the level of specialization and detail that was allowed by the Rubenstein Library’s large size. During the fall semester I was essentially doing the job that any full-time processing archivist would do, just as an apprentice, so to speak, under Zachary Tumlin’s tutelage. Tumlin, the Duke Family Papers Project Archivist, was tasked with processing the many additions from Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans to her collection of family papers at Duke University, and I was hired to assist him. Our job was to establish physical and intellectual control of the donated materials and arrange, rehouse, and describe them for use by others. In the short term, we prepared a number of these objects for the digitization I would do at the Digital Production Center (DPC) in the Spring semester. Through this work I learned more than most about the Duke family, Mary Semans in particular, and her many children and grandchildren.
What makes Mary Semans’ donations so special are her ties to the founding Dukes. Being one of the last living Dukes to have known Benjamin Newton Duke, her maternal grandfather, Mary Semans had a wealth of Duke family history from Benjamin Duke to donate to the Rubenstein Library. For this reason, I was able to interact with objects with date ranges from the late 19th century up to the 2010s, specifically a large variety of photographic formats. Before working at Duke, I had never interacted with a tintype, one of the earliest democratic photography formats (meaning widely available to the public) that, while involving metals in photo processing, ironically tended to use metals other than tin. I was taught about the preservation of tintypes from talking with staff the Conservation Department, also learning how to keep them stored for long term preservation. The education I received through interacting hands-on with items that spanned such a broad period of history is a rare opportunity and will undoubtedly serve me well in my future archival endeavors.
Figure 2: Tintype featuring Benjamin Duke (upper left), Sarah Duke (upper right), Mary Duke Biddle (lower left), and Angier Buchanan Duke (bottom middle).
Learning about Mary Semans as a person would be sure to leave an impact on anyone. This heir to Benjamin Duke’s wealth did more than most with the wealth she was born into. As a philanthropist, she supported the university that bears her family’s name (with Duke being named after her great Grandfather) and the city in which it is situated. She did much to advocate for the people of NC nationally and internationally, earning the nickname “the unofficial First Lady of NC.” Her support for the arts, medicine, the disabled, and civil rights throughout her life is laudable. She was not unacquainted with grief, with her parents divorcing when she was around 10 years old and losing her first husband, with whom she had four children, at the young age of 28. Yet, she did not let this grief define her, marrying again, raising a total of seven children, and remaining vigorously invested in public life in Durham and NC until her death in 2012. I recall looking through numerous folders of photographs from trips to Europe in the 1990s that were not just sightseeing tours. Each trip was connected to the North Carolina School of the Arts’ International Music Program, designed to introduce students to the life of a touring musician while promoting North Carolina internationally. Even while traveling abroad, Mary Semans was committed to supporting the residents and the state of North Carolina.
Figure 3: Mary Semans, Duke alumna
The people in Duke Libraries who worked around me, and directly with me, imparted knowledge to me that will benefit me throughout my career. The team cohesion at the Digital Production Center (DPC) was evident from my first day this spring. Everyone in the DPC is dedicated to seeing their work reach maximum potential in efficiency and quality, utilizing the best in cultural heritage digitization processes. My work at the DPC saw me scanning artifacts from the Rubenstein Library’s collections, creating faithful digital surrogates for online teaching, learning, and research. In particular, I was able to work with courtship letters from 1935-1938 between Mary Semans and her first husband (Joe Trent), from processing in the Fall through to their digital existence with my work at the DPC. I felt very much at ease working at the DPC, knowing I had experts surrounding me that were eager to share their knowledge and ensure I had a successful internship. I could go on recognizing the talented individuals working in the DPC, but this is meant to be a relatively short blog post, so I will refrain for now.
Figure 4: Author at scanning station in the DPC.
I leave Duke University Libraries, more confident than ever in my abilities to enter the job market with the skills necessary to land me a full-time job in archiving. Duke has also left me with a stronger conviction that archiving is what I want to spend my career pursuing. I hope the reader understands the dedication of the Rubenstein Library’s staff and takes the time to browse their collections, many online (Duke Family Papers), perhaps in the process learning some about the founding family at Duke University and their significant contributions to the Durham area.
Post contributed by Ama Kyereme, Curatorial Intern for the Archive of Documentary Arts (24-25) and curator of “Movement and Memory Through the Lens of Danny Lyon.” The exhibit is on display in the Rubenstein Library Photography Gallery through November 2, 2025.
In 1962, Danny Lyon, then a college student at university of Chicago, hitchhiked from Chicago to Cairo, Illinois, to document segregation to document segregation, and to join the Civil Rights Movement. Brought in by James Forman to work as the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lyon traveled across the U.S. South documenting the conditions that initially prompted him to action. Armed with his camera, he made his way into spaces that his Black colleagues typically couldn’t go. From the Leesburg Stockade in Virginia to the Toddle House diner sit-in in Atlanta, the photographs Lyon made captured the ethos of the civil rights era. Facing hostile police and armed guards wielding bayonets, Lyon often placed himself in the middle of action to represent in photographs what he was experiencing.
Peaceful protests are foundational to the Civil Rights Movement, but violence is inextricable to the Movement’s history. That violence, both visible and invisible, is on full display in several photographs selected for this exhibition, from protests arrests to the funeral for the girls bombed in Birmingham, AL. While Lyon did not hold back from documenting the volatility of the revolution as he witnessed it, he focused his camera on capturing the Movement as it was to him and those around him. He directed the camera just as much towards moments of stillness, depicting the reality of the Movement within the image, as well as between and beyond the frame. He made evidence of organizing, protesting, rest, grief, and celebration, all equally deliberate actions towards an investment in an imagined future. Many of the images Danny created during this period became synonymous with SNCC and the Civil Rights Movement, and through their circulation were key in bringing about social and political change. The images of the young girls imprisoned in the Leesburg Stockade in Virginia were critical in making the public aware of the condition these girls were in, and ultimately led to their release. In this way, there is a cycle of action that Danny’s photographs take part in. Danny’s impulse to follow the action leads him to take photographs, and in turn he takes action through the intervention of taking a photograph. The photograph then goes on to act as a catalyst for other social and political action based on the content of the image. In addition to the iconic and spectacular images of the era, this exhibit includes images that provide a more comprehensive narrative of SNCC activism, through depictions of the South as a geographic hub, the role of women and youth, and the involvement of the church and religion as equally critical parts of the Civil Rights Movement.
Post contributed by Ani Karagianis, Centennial Archivist.
Hello again! You may have noticed if you follow the Devil’s Tale with as much fervor as I do, that this is a continuation of a blog series on Civil Rights, a series that will end whenever somebody stops me. This blog post highlights one person who had simultaneously stayed in the Georgian East Campus and spent time in prison for her participation in the Freedom Rides.
They say well behaved women seldom make history. Joan Mulholland, in the eyes of a segregated Duke in 1959, certainly fit that mold. A woman who was deemed odd for not rushing a sorority would later become a crucial member of the Freedom Rider movement, and has advocated for civil rights all her life.
Joan’s story begins in Washington D.C. in 1941. She was born to working parents, a father from Iowa and a mother from rural Georgia. Joan spent her early years in Arlington, VA, which she claimed, according to a 2013 oral history now housed at the Library of Congress and part of the Museum of African American History and Culture, “was definitely the South, maybe not the Deep South, but everything by law and custom was segregated.”[1] Growing up in a Presbyterian church, Joan would later become annoyed at the perceived hypocrisy of the church preaching equality in a segregated town. The church became an early place for her growing interest in civil rights, starting with Black students attending her then all white church, a move that had to be kept secret to maintain the safety of both Black and white students.[2] Joan would later note that “as a Southerner, that we needed to change. And when I had my chance to do something, I would seize it”[3] after viewing the stark differences between Black and white schools.
Fast forward a few years, and Joan started to look at colleges. While Joan wanted to go to a small school in Ohio, her mother, “a product of her environment” pushed Joan towards Duke University, a school that, according to Joan, “was safely segregated.”[4] At this point (1959), Duke University was still two years away from desegregating the graduate schools, and three years away from desegregating the undergrad population. Duke students had begun advocating for desegregation in 1948, when members of the Divinity School sent around a petition calling for desegregation. Unfortunately, these early efforts and the efforts throughout the 1950s fell on mostly deaf ears in the Board of Trustees.
Joan Trumpauer from the 1960 Chanticleer yearbook. It’s digitized here!
Joan attended Duke for a year—1959-1960. Durham proved to be a great place for Joan to build on her growing desire to make things right, and North Carolina was a good spot for the growing Civil Rights movement. Not long after four students from North Carolina A&T in Greensboro integrated their lunch counter at Woolworth’s, Joan and some other white students attended sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Durham with students from North Carolina Central University.
Article from the July 2, 1960 edition of the Durham Herald about sit-ins at the S.H. Kress Store.
More news coverage of the Kress Store sit-in, including a list of students who participated.
[1] Mulholland, Joan Trumpauer, Interviewee, John Dittmer, and U.S Civil Rights History Project. Joan Trumpauer Mulholland oral history interview conducted by John Dittmer in Arlington, Virginia. 2013. Video. https://www.loc.gov/item/2015669178/.
Contributed by David K. Seitz, associate professor of cultural geography, Harvey Mudd College: Recipient of an Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Research Travel Grant, 2024-25, supported by the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Foundation
The intellectual and creative legacy of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is so multi-layered and wide-ranging that even such adjectives scarcely do it justice. But across the many webs and folds of experience and knowledge that Sedgwick’s work interweaves, it is difficult to miss the recurrence of a particular charismatic megafauna: the giant panda.
Pandas, art historian Jason Edwards observes, were “were crucial to Sedgwick’s late style,” appearing in several of her books, poems, and craft works from 1996 onward. But Sedgwick’s panda-love, Edwards points out, began much earlier, as an attachment formed in childhood and sustained in the exchange of countless panda cards over the course of her remarkable marriage to optometry professor Hal Sedgwick. Eve Sedgwick noticed all kinds of queer possibilities and pleasures in pandas – their ambiguous gendering, cozy contentment, shyness, roundness – and in the cross-cultural encounters convened around them, as in China’s practice of “panda diplomacy.”
I came to the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library under the auspices of the Sallie Bingham Center with a particular interest in Sedgwick’s attention to questions of race, class, and empire. Although I certainly imagined that such questions might come up in her correspondence with Richard Fung, the acclaimed Chinese-Trinidadian-Canadian queer experimental filmmaker, I had not anticipated the place of the panda in such exchanges.
Fung’s card to Sedgwick. Courtesy of David Seitz
In March 1991, Fung visited Duke under Sedgwick’s auspices, screening his 1990 film My Mother’s Place and lecturing on questions of race, gender, and sexuality in Chinese and Caribbean diasporas. There, he met Sedgwick’s student, José Esteban Muñoz, who would later analyze “My Mother’s Place” in his germinalbook Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Politics of Performance. Upon returning home to Toronto, Fung chose an apposite thank-you note for Eve Sedgwick’s hospitality: a pop-up card of two pandas in playful repose, sold to benefit the World Wildlife Fund.
The card must have delighted Eve, both in its imagery and in its three dimensionality, given her interest in the aesthetics of texture and touch. Fung’s postscript – “Which do you think is the girl panda and the boy panda? How do you know?” – subtly extended his longstanding, both serious and playful criticisms of Western stereotypes about Asian genders and sexualities, and must also have affected her. Two years later, in Tendencies, Sedgwick listed Fung among queer artists of color who “do a new kind of justice to the fractal intimacies of language, skin, migration, state.”
Fung’s panda card underscores the wisdom of Edwards’s advice against dismissing Sedgwick’s panda-love as “childish” or “peripheral” to her intellectual and creative contributions. If anything, the card offers an apt metaphor: it is the surprises that “pop up” in Sedgwick’s archive and in all archival encounters that often prove the most informative.
Further Reading:
Edwards, Jason, ed. Bathroom Songs: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet, (Santa Barbara, California: Punctum Books, 10 Nov. 2017) doi: https://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0189.1.00.
Edwards, Jason. Queer and Bookish: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as Book Artist, (Santa Barbara, California: Punctum Books, 03 Mar. 2022) doi: https://doi.org/10.53288/0328.1.00.
Fung, Richard, dir. My Mother’s Place (Toronto, Canada: V-Tape, 1990).
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Politics of Performance, (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1 May 1999).
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. A Dialogue on Love, (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 9 Jun. 2000).
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Weather in Proust, ed. Jonathan Goldberg, (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, Dec. 2011) doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394921.
Contributed by Paula Ramos, Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History at the Federal University of São Paulo.
In August 2024, I visited the Bingham Center at the Rubenstein Library, as a recipient of a 2024-2025 Mary Lily Research Travel Grant, where I had the privilege of researching the papers of Kate Millett and Clarissa Sligh, American artists, activists, and writers. My interest in their documents emerged while I was developing a research project for my Postdoctoral studies in Art History at the Federal University of São Paulo. The project explores how some artists challenged confinements rooted in colonial and patriarchal structures that normalize power mechanisms, such as mass incarceration of Black people, the pathologization of the female gender, and the symbolic, cultural, and epistemological constraints imposed intersectionally by issues of race, sexuality, class, and gender.
For fourteen years, Kate Millett was preoccupied with the story of Sylvia Likens, a sixteen-year-old white girl found dead in a basement in Indianapolis after suffering abuse and torture at the hands of her caregiver and the caregiver’s children in 1965. Millett was moved to closely follow the trial of those involved in Likens’s murder, resulting in years of research and the compilation of newspaper and magazine clippings. In addition to the installation The Trial of Sylvia Likens (1978), created from enlarged newspaper clippings on wooden panels and clothed mannequins to recreate the courtroom scene, Millett wrote The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice (1979). The book expands the notion of violence tied to the female gender by tracing Millett’s identification with the young Sylvia Likens:
“You have been with me ever since, an incubus, a nightmare, my own nightmare, the nightmare of adolescence, of growing up a female child, of becoming a woman in a world set against us, a world we have lost and where we are everywhere reminded of our defeat.”
The Loony Bin Trip by Kate Millett, Simon and Schuster, 1991.
As I continued to investigate her personal archives, I began to explore similarities between this story and the confinement Millett experienced during her three involuntary hospitalizations in psychiatric institutions — a fact she would only reveal publicly many years later, in her book The Loony Bin Trip (1990), which took over five years to be published, partly due to the controversial nature of its subject matter.
Gleason, Katherine. “To the bin and back.” Clipping (n.d.) from the Kate Millett Papers, Box W4.
In an article by Katharine Gleason, “To the Bin and Back,” published on the book’s release, Millett describes how she was taken by her sister, her husband, and her ex-lover to be hospitalized against her will for the first time in 1973. Millett emphasizes the political and ideological factors surrounding her hospitalization. Her sister disapproved of her efforts to free a Trinidadian civil rights activist accused of murder, as she said: “I returned to Berkeley full of this — it was the biggest civil rights assignment I had ever had. To stop a lynching, to prevent a hanging… It was not, however, all-absorbing to my friends.”
Just as Millett sought to free herself from the stigmatized labels of female madness, which misinterpreted the radicalization of women’s struggles and lead to psychiatric hospitalizations, she also wanted to liberate the case of Likens from the narrow constraints of the police-judicial narrative. Not surprisingly, in the box of correspondence from people who had read the book, a man from Indianapolis expressed disgust, justifying his indignation by the fact that Millett refuses to report the case objectively: “Instead of reading an account of what took place by someone who had researched the subject as the book jacket indicated, I was instead hit with a barrage of disjointed, unconnected and at times perverted reactions to the entire situation.” In contrast, I read dozens of other letters from women moved by the book, congratulating Millett for her courage in sharing her personal testimony in The Basement. Among them, I was struck by a letter from a student who read the book in a course on domestic violence, who concluded: “Most of the men in class could not go as far in looking at the implications of the book. Most were empathetic, but really not able to identify with the themes (at least as we interpreted them) in the book.”
Letter from Nancy Oppenlander to Kate Millett in a letterhead paper from Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. February 23, 1981. From the Kate Millett Papers, Box BMT3.
This brief analysis of the reception of Millett’s work led me, while writing this text, to explore the various attempts by Clarissa Sligh to publish her book Wrongly Bodied (2009). The book documents the long process of gender transition from female to male of Sligh’s friend Jake, who requested to be photographed by her in 1997, while exploring the visibility of issues that were often kept secret due to societal judgment.
L: Jake reflected in mirror, April 13, 1997. R: Jake with Clarissa Sligh, November 8, 1997. Both from: Sligh, Clarissa. Wrongly Bodied: Documenting Transition from Female to Male. Philadelphia: Leeway Foundation, 2009.
Upon finding the folder of correspondence with publishers, I was shocked to discover that around twelve publishers had returned the book, praising the importance of the subject but lamenting the impossibility of its publication, with comments such as: “It’s impressive and important, but, sadly, I don’t think we are the right place for it;” “It does not fit comfortably into our current publishing program;” or “A book on this subject would not fit our list at the present time.” Sligh also produced a hand-made artists’ book version, Wrongly Bodied Two, published through Women’s Studio Workshop in 2004.
Just like Millett identified with Likens, Sligh identifies with Jake — or at least establishes connections between her own life and her subject, despite the differences between them (a Black artist photographing a white trans man). This identification is grounded in the perception of societal standards of passability, which determine which bodies fit into or are excluded from society. Sligh, in the introduction of the book, says: “To comprehend an identity change of this magnitude, I turned to my family background in the history of the slavery in this country.”
In the book, the artist draws a parallel with the story of Ellen Craft, “a light skin female slave who, in 1848, disguised herself as an invalid Southern gentleman, and the master of her husband is inserted into the narrative. She crossed the Mason Dixon line by successfully crossing the boundaries of black to white, slave to owner, woman to man, and wife to master.” Sligh concludes her argument in a document about the potential readership for Wrongly Bodied in response to the demands of many publishers: “The concept of ‘transgender’ impacts the currently contested debates about whether gender, race, and class are natural, constructions, or performance.” In the realm of literary and artistic acceptance, creative constraints are numerous, yet both Millett and Sligh challenge these barriers, expanding the limited spaces available to themselves and their peers.
Post contributed by Madeline Huh, Trent History of Medicine Intern.
A couple weeks ago, Rachel Ingold, curator of the History of Medicine Collections, and I were setting up for a library instruction session in the Rubenstein that included some materials relating to midwifery, labor, and childbirth. One of these books discussed what were known as “monstrous births” during the medieval and early modern period, which sparked a discussion about Mary Toft, an 18th century woman infamous for tricking doctors into thinking she had given birth to rabbits.
Mary Toft was a 25-year-old poor, illiterate servant from Surrey who became pregnant in 1726 but apparently miscarried in August 1726 after an encounter with a rabbit. Around a month later, in September, she claimed that she was still pregnant, and her family called upon the obstetrician John Howard to watch over her in her apparently pregnant state.
According to Howard, Toft soon gave birth to several animal parts, including a cat without a liver, a rabbit’s head, the legs of a cat, and nine dead baby rabbits. The story of her miraculous births reached the press and spread around England, and consequently the King of England dispatched two men to investigate the situation, one of whom was surgeon-anatomist Nathanael St. Andre. St. Andre wrote an account of Toft’s alleged supernatural births called A short narrative of an extraordinary delivery of rabbets (1727), a copy of which is held in the Trent Collection within the Rubenstein Library’s History of Medicine Collections.
The title page of Nathanael St. Andre’s A short narrative of an extraordinary delivery of rabbets.
St. Andre describes the circumstances under which Mary claimed to remain pregnant after miscarrying:
“The account she further gave of herself, was, that on the 23rd of April last, as she was weeding in a Field, she saw a Rabbet spring up near her, after which she ran, with another Woman that was at work just by her; this set her a longing for Rabbets…The same night she dreamt that she was in a Field with those two Rabbets in her Lap, and awaked with a sick Fit, which lasted till Morning; from that time, for above three Months, she had a constant and strong desire to eat Rabbets but being very poor and indigent cou’d not procure any. About seventeen Weeks after her longing, she was taken with a Flooding and violent Cholick pains, which made her miscarry of a Substance that she said was like a large lump of Flesh…she did not perceive her self to grow less but continued with the symptoms of a breeding Woman” (23-24).
St. Andre then goes on to discuss Toft’s secondary labor and her subsequent birth of rabbits as it was told to him by Dr. John Howard.
St. Andre’s narrative about Toft’s miscarriage and animal births is indicative of a broader cultural fascination with monstrous birth in early modern Europe. Broadly, a monstrous birth is defined as an animal or human birth involving a defect that renders a child so “malformed” as to be considered monstrous. Deformed tissue, incompletely separated twins, ambiguous sexual development, or irregularly shaped children, which we would now in many cases attribute to genetic or chromosomal causes, all fell under the general umbrella of “monstrousness.” In the early modern imagination, monstrous births could be religious omens, signs from God, or evidence of supernatural influences. But perhaps more interestingly (to me, at least), monstrous births were also seen as indicators of a mother’s morality, or rather, a lapse in her morality. Private gynecological “disasters” and abnormalities of birth were highly public and sensationalized affairs within communities that often reflected poorly on a mother’s social and sexual reputation.
For example, when Margaret Mere gave birth to a deformed child in 1568, her neighbors attributed it to her wanton sexual behavior and accused her of having sex out of wedlock. Agnes Bowker’s alleged birth of a cat in 1569 led to the slander of her sexual propriety and resulted in concerns about the consequences of such an abnormal birth for the community as a whole. Both cases highlight the tendency of neighbors and community members to condemn mothers who miscarried or gave birth to “monstrous” children and the sense of anxiety that pervaded communities in the aftermath of gynecological disaster.
Mother and monstrous child both became sources of fear and dread beyond the immediate community through the representation of monstrous births in pamphlets, broadsides, and other relatively cheap printed materials accessible to a broad audience. One example of this is a little pamphlet called Signes and wonders from heaven (1645), also in the Trent Collection, which reports on several supernatural events including a discovery of witches, a cat that gave birth to a monster, and a monster born in Ratcliffe Highway. Public fascination with abnormal animal and human births created a popular demand for these types of publications.
Pamphlets discussing monstrous births like this one were popular among the English public.
Sometimes, the sensationalism that came with a monstrous birth was desired and even pursued by women, which seems to be the case with Mary Toft. Toft and her family seem to have perpetuated the story that she had given birth to rabbits to exploit some of the benefits of fame and money associated with faking a monstrous birth.
As the intern for the History of Medicine Collections, I’m currently working on an exhibit which will open later in the spring–not on monstrous births, but on a tangentially related topic–and the idea of monstrous births has emerged several times throughout my research. I’ve found the representation of monstrous births interesting not only for the way that early modern sources depict the relationship between mother and monstrous child but also for the way that they publicize these sorts of obstetrical events and inspire a sense of terror. I always enjoy learning about strange moments in the history of women’s health, and the case of Mary Toft is certainly one of these.
