We continue our report on how we spent the $10,000 gift we received from the Woman’s Educational Society, celebrating three foundational feminist works newly acquired for Special Collections:

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. History of Woman Suffrage. Rochester, New York: Charles Mann, 1887. Three volumes (volume 1: 1848-1861; volume 2: 1861-1876; volume 3: 1876-1885). A comprehensive overview of the woman suffrage movement by those who led it.

Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929. In dust jacket designed by Vanessa Bell. First American edition, simultaneous with British edition.  

Betty Friedan. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1963. First edition, in jacket. Friedan researches and describes what she calls “the problem that has no name” — the dissatisfaction and depression of materially-comfortable American housewives in the 1950s.