Special Collections & University Archives will be open from 8:30 am - 5:00 pm Monday, November 20 - Wednesday, November 22. The department will be closed Thursday, November 23 & Friday, November 24.
Special Collections has recently purchased a rare set of trade cards designed by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The set is known as the “Three Ages of Woman” and is complete with six cards. Trade cards were a common form of advertising in the nineteenth century - businesses would purchase cards printed with images and then letterpress their store information over the image, or on the back of the card. They would be distributed to potential customers and were often collected. Gilman’s set is distinctive for its unusual and highly symbolic imagery. The six card set is comprised of two three card themes - a religious series and a secular series. Each card depicts a different stage of a girl’s development (baby, young girl, and young woman) according to popular representations of religious and secular iconography. Each girl’s head is wrapped in a flower, and the series can be interpreted according to the “language of flowers,” a method popular in the Victorian era of describing attributes based on the designs of flowers. All six cards can be studied in detail at the links below. The top three cards are the religious series, the bottom three are the secular series.
The life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, is the focus of a controversial new film as well as television documentaries and historical fiction novels. Marie Antoinette has been re-imagined countless times since her death, and current interest attempts once again to understand her according to contemporary attitudes.
At the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections & University Archives department, a collection of pamphlets brings Marie Antoinette and the upheaval of the French Revolution to life. Pamphlets – cheap, quickly printed gatherings of sheets that were sold unbound – were one of the primary forms of mass communication during the eighteenth century. The French Revolution collection contains 
pamphlets commenting on many of the events and attitudes that defined the Revolution, written in the highly charged, propagandistic style that is found today in weblogs. Marie Antoinette is a common topic in these publications, where she is both praised and (more often than not) mocked and criticized. There are pamphlets discussing the affair of the diamond necklace – a public scandal that solidified opinion against her, and the trial and execution of her husband, Louis XVI. Click on the image at left to view examples.
A famous example of a longer work in the collection is Essais sur la vie de Marie Antoinette. This book is a “libel” – a salacious account intended to harm the Queen’s reputation. It was first published in 1783 and was immediately suppressed by the government. Unfortunately for Marie Antoinette it proved to be very popular, and was secretly reprinted in France and abroad many times over the next decade. Special Collections holds several copies, and viewing them together provides a sense of the wide reach this type of political discourse had. Today, modern scholarship is attempting to balance this tradition of scandalous myth with historical context and perhaps a greater sympathy to the unique circumstances that overwhelmed Marie Antoinette’s colorful life.
The French Revolution pamphlet collection is currently accessible through a card catalog that may be viewed by visiting the Special Collections & University Archives reading room.
