Celebrating Women’s History
On Display
Stories

Ashley Brown. | Dave Giroux of Dave Giroux Photography.
Ashley Brown Wins 2025 Shapiro Book Prize
The Huntington has awarded the 2025 Shapiro Book Prize to Ashley Brown for the biography “Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson.” The biennial prize, which includes a $10,000 cash award, honors an outstanding first scholarly monograph in American history and culture.
Before Eve Babitz became a published writer, she was a visual artist, and her chosen medium was collage. Inspired by Joseph Cornell and Andy Warhol, she created the album cover art for Buffalo Springfield’s “Buffalo Springfield Again” and The Byrds’ “Untitled.”
In the spring of 2022, Tongva photographer Mercedes Dorame peered down at a tide pool on Santa Cruz Island, roughly 25 miles off the coast of California. Focusing her camera, she captured an image that provides a window into worlds.
On Jan. 17–18, 2025, The Huntington hosted a research conference titled “Abortion in American History,” which explored more than a century of abortion history in the United States before 1973.
In 2017, the first major exhibition on the life and work of award-winning science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) was held at The Huntington, where her literary archive resides. She was the first science fiction writer to receive a prestigious MacArthur “genius” award and the first African American woman to win widespread recognition for writing in that genre. In that time, The Huntington has produced dozens of stories about this iconic woman.
What happens when women get together in a group for tea and conversation? The Huntington conference “Correspondence and Embodiment: The Bluestocking Corpus Online,” held Dec. 8–9 and organized in collaboration with the Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online project, investigated new questions derived from the recent digitization of The Huntington’s Elizabeth Montagu Papers.
Renowned American artist Betye Saar’s large-scale work “Drifting Toward Twilight”—commissioned by The Huntington—is a site-specific installation that features a 17-foot-long vintage wooden canoe and found objects, including birdcages, antlers, and natural materials harvested by Saar from The Huntington’s grounds.
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Women in Literature
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Programming
Thu., Apr. 10 | 2:30–3:30 p.m.
Lorraine Wilcox, professor at Emperor’s College, presents the writings of three female doctors from late imperial China.
Wed., May 14 | 7:30–8:30 p.m.
Ashley Brown, winner of the 2025 Shapiro Book Prize, discusses her biography of Althea Gibson, the first African American tennis player to win titles at Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals.