II. Instructions:
1. Choose an artifact from the period between 1600 and 1900 that highlights the changes or continuities of American women’s lives. Your artifact can be a document, photograph, art, clothing, furniture, advertisement, or any other tangible item from that period. It could be one from the museums below or the personal possessions of someone you know. Make sure it directly relates to women’s lives or experiences during the given period.
2. Browse the following museums to review some artifacts:
–American Women’s History Museum, https://womenshistory.si.edu/collectionsLinks to an external site.
–National Museum of African American History and Culture, https://nmaahc.si.edu/Links to an external site.
–National Museum of American History, https://americanhistory.si.edu/Links to an external site.
–National Museum of the American Indians, https://americanindian.si.edu/Links to an external site.
–Maryland Center for History and Culture, https://www.mdhistory.org/Links to an external site.
3. Introduce your artifact. Please provide a detailed description of your artifact and its photo by answering the questions below.
1) What is your artifact? Add its photo with full citation (title/name, creator if known, approximate date created, the material used, current location, and original location).
2) Write a paragraph-length (or 150-200 words) introduction of the artifact, including the description of the artifact, its function, and an explanation of how it illustrated an aspect of an American woman’s life between 1600 and 1900.
4. What are your key sources? List the three most relevant and reliable sources for the paper using APA, MLA, or Turabian styles.
5. See the example of an artifact below.
Artifact: Sojourner Truth’s visitation card (Carte de visite of Sojourner Truth). See also p. 206 in Part II of our textbook, Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, to learn more about Truth and this card.
Photo location: The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMFA): https://www.berkeleyside.org/2016/07/28/see-sojourner-truths-calling-cards-at-bampfaLinks to an external site.
Artifact details
• Date: 1863
• Artist: Unidentified artist
• Sitter: Sojourner Truth, c. 1797 – 26 Nov 1883
• Exhibition Label: albumen print mounted on cardboard, size 4 x 2 1/2 in.
Description of the artifact from the museum:
“Cartes de visite are small, 2½- by 4-inch pieces of cardboard adorned with a photograph that functioned in a similar capacity to modern-day business cards. Invented in France in 1854, the carte de visite quickly became popular in the U.S., and were utilized by abolitionists like Truth to disseminate their message.
Truth was born Isabella Baumfree, a slave in upstate New York who actually learned how to speak Dutch before English. A mother of five, Truth stayed in New York until 1826 when she ran away with one of her children. In 1843, she took the name Sojourner Truth, and spent the rest of her life advocating for the abolition of slavery and for women’s rights, as well as teaching skills to freed Southern slaves.
Truth was a formidable speaker, and her speech given at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron in 1851 — which would eventually come to be known as “Ain’t I A Woman”— is to this day one of the most iconic pieces of women’s rights rhetoric.
Not only are the cartes being displayed at BAMPFA remarkable images worthy of artistic examination, they’re also indicative of the savvy that Truth possessed in manipulating the media of the time, as well as the sophistication of her message. On one carte, Truth announces the reclamation of herself with the caption “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.”
“She is claiming ownership in multiple ways,” says UC Berkeley art history professor Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby about the caption. “She does it by using her full name, the name she chose for herself. She was a woman who had been property, but with the caption she is seizing the first-person — I. She also is claiming ownership with the word ‘sell.’ She is the one in charge of the transaction now — but she’s not selling herself the same way that she had been sold into slavery, she’s selling her shadow to support her substance. Her substance walks away from here. You can keep the shadow.”
