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Our Mission

The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture in Duke's Rubenstein Library acquires, preserves and makes available to a large population of researchers published and unpublished materials that reflect the public and private lives of women, past and present. 

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News & Events

Upcoming event: 

Inaugural Janie K. Long Speaker Series: Queer Student Activism at Duke

Janie Long group shot

Date: Saturday, April 29

Time: 3:00 p.m.

Location: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room (Rubenstein Library room 153)

Please register here.

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Women at the Center  Fall, 2022: The Abortion Decision exhibit; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Travel Grant recipient, Jennifer Doyle reports on her vsit to the Bingham Center; Josephine Napoleon Leary book and exhibit, and more

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The Lisa Unger Baskin Collection

Virginia Woolf's writing deskThe Lisa Unger Baskin Collection documents women’s work, broadly conceived, from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Carefully assembled over 45 years by noted bibliophile, activist and collector Lisa Unger Baskin, the collection includes more than 11,000 rare books and thousands of manuscripts, journals, ephemera and artifacts. Among the works are many well-known monuments of women’s history and literature, as well as lesser-known works produced by female scholars, printers, publishers, scientists, artists and political activists. Taken together, they comprise a mosaic of the ways that women have been productive, creative, and socially engaged over more than 500 years.

Image: Viriginia Woolf's Writing Desk, Painted by her nephew Quentin Bell, c. 1929. Photograph by Annie Schlechter.

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