Focus On Women: June 2, 2022 Auction Highlights

Swann’s second annual Focus on Women sale, as its name suggests, is an opportunity to emphasize women’s experiences and contributions to literature, science, art, politics, and thought. With published and manuscript material from the hand-press period, through the work of living artists, bidders will have a chance to bid on photographs, prints, books, and more material, while remembering women’s stories through time.

Celebrating Black Women

This year’s Focus On Women sale contains the work of a number of significant Black women. Beginning with a rare Phillis Wheatley poem, and continuing into the nineteenth century, with Sojourner Truth’s autobiography. The sale also includes many literary prize winners and first editions from the twentieth century.

We are pleased to offer Georgia Johnson’s Bronze, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville, and a number of first editions by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Black activists and artists are also represented, including material related to Angela Davis, Rosa Parks, and Josephine Baker.

Related Reading

Travel Diaries, Unpublished Letters, Manuscripts & More

In an effort to preserve the stories of all women, we are also pleased to include lots documenting the lives Christine La Barraque, Norma Jean Croy, the Harvard College house cleaning team, and unique manuscript material created by people obscured by a male-dominated lens. Through travel diaries and unpublished letters the lives and characters of women come back into focus.

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