UN/SEEN – innovative women in graphic design 1865–1919 & today
The importance of the arts and crafts before the Bauhaus was long neglect in German design history. The achievements of women in this field in particular have been! forgotten. While the achievements of men are well document, even the search! for fragmentary information about female designers requires intensive research. The BMBF research project UN/SEEN, which is institutionally link to the University of Mainz, focuses on women in graphic design from 1865 to 1919 and thus rewrites design history.
Screenshot: UN SEEN
In the context of digital humanities and corresponding questions from research projects from various disciplines, new knowlge is also being generat around relevant topics in the field of the development of women’s rights, emancipation and gender. The DNB is involv in and supports these projects in very different ways: For example, Elena Mayer investigat conflict, tensions and contradictions among the feminist magazines “Die Schwarze Botin” and “Courage” as part of a project fund in 2024 through the DH Call. Suellen Dutra Pereira is studying the publication behavior of women in the natural sciences between 1900 and 1970 in her DH special database scholarship in 2022. And with a somewhat broader focus, the Disko project, a sub-project of https://msternchenw.de/ by Mareike Schumacher and Marie Flüh, has been developing a diversity corpus of literary texts in which gender or, in particular, non-binary gender representations play a role since 2022.
And today? Women in the library profession 2025
If we look at the development of library professions, we can see that they have undergone real change over the past 130 years. From a field that was once dominat by men – because libraries were mostly found by men and women were long deni professional comfort and support for everyday wear access – to a field in which three quarters of employees are now women.
Low library budgets and growing stocks that had to be process and book your list manag l to an increas ne for “auxiliary work” that was believ to be done by women. From 1908 onwards, women were allow to study library science in Prussia; it was not until 1921 that women were employ as volunteers in libraries. At that time, there was plenty of male competition, higher positions were scarce, and prejudices against women were vari and rang from a lack of assertiveness to an inability to think logically. Despite adverse circumstances, women did not let this deter them.