?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
Bingham, Sophia (1787-1852) Ladies' Copies.
Boston: Caleb Bingham, ca. 1800
Oblong 32mo; engraved title and 15 unnumbered leaves with alphabets and maxims for copying, printed on rectos only; bound in the original light blue wrappers (title and first text leaf detached, stained, toned, a few open corner tears; minor losses to edge of lower wrapper, soiled, foxed); 2 1/2 x 7 in.
Sophia Bingham likely created this copybook to benefit young women attending public schools in Boston, Massachusetts during the early 19th century. She was the daughter of renowned American educator, textbook writer, and bookseller Caleb Bingham (1757-1817), who operated a successful private school for girls in the city beginning in 1784. Bingham's school was remarkable for going beyond the conventional curriculum of penmanship and composition typically assigned to female students. Pupils were taught mathematics, grammar, writing, and reading, offering them a rare and rigorous education usually reserved for men. In 1796, he retired from education to focus on writing and publishing textbooks for use in the local schools. The present work is likely one of these projects, on which he collaborated with his daughter. More than a simple copybook, Sophia Bingham's Ladies' Copies subverts the restrictions placed on women's education. In transcribing powerful maxims such as, "Genius is not confined to either sex," women owners were encouraged to claim the value of their intellect while continuing to operate within the confines placed upon their education by the state.
