Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Eve M. Kahn

  Independent scholar Eve M. Kahn is the former Antiques columnist for The New York Times. Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857-1907 (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) won prizes from organizations including the Connecticut League of History Organizations and the Connecticut Center for the Book. Kahn contributes regularly to the Times, The Magazine Antiques, Apollo magazine and Atlas Obscura. Her book…

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Jeanne Mammen, “Neue Frau”

And speaking of the “New Woman,” as I believe we were, allow me to introduce you to German artist and illustrator Jeanne Mammen (1890-1976) whose life and work in the 1920s and 1930s embodied the “Neue Frau” in Berlin. Mammen was born in Berlin in 1890, but her family moved to Paris when she was…

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Butterflies, Bugs, and Maria Sibylla Merian

Once you start looking, it seems like you find examples of women who did important things in the past everywhere. Women you’ve never heard of unless you happen to be in their field of expertise—and maybe not even then. Take, for instance, naturalist and illustrator Maria Sibyella Merian (1647-1717). She was trained as a painter…

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