The naturalist Martha Maxwell, perhaps the first female naturalist to shoot and prepare her own specimens, shown in one of her signature lifelike tableaus around 1879
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Duke University Libraries

A Women’s Exhibition 500 Years in the Making

In 2019, Duke Libraries’ Lisa Unger Baskin Collection went digital and mobile. Comprising more than 10,000 rare books and thousands of manuscripts, journals, items of ephemera and artifacts spanning five centuries, the enormous body of material elucidates women’s work in all its diversity.

Baskin, who donated her collection to Duke in 2015, helped curate “500 Years of Women’s Work.” This online and traveling exhibition shows the depth of the collection, revealing the lives of women both famous and forgotten and recognizing their accomplishments. The exhibition began at Duke’s Rubenstein Library and went to New York City in late 2019 and early 2020 for display at the Grolier Club, America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles. It attracted record crowds and received glowing write-ups in The New York TimesSmithsonianThe New York Review of Books and other outlets.  

“500 Years of Women’s Work” was made possible in part by a $150,000 gift from Christine Moog and $100,000 from Amanda ’87 and Thomas Lister ’86.