On Land and On Sea : A Century of Women in the Rosenfeld Collection

The Rosenfeld Collection at Mystic Seaport Museum is nationally and internationally renowned for the extraordinary maritime photography of the Rosenfeld family.

Less known are the other images included in this Collection of close to a million photographs, taken by Morris Rosenfeld and Sons.

As the daughter-in-law of Stanley Rosenfeld, Margaret L. Andersen Rosenfeld has compiled some of the images of women found in the Collection-some nautical, some not-thereby telling a story, seen through the Rosenfelds' eyes, of the social history of women. On Land and On Sea features the lives of women in the yachting world, but also documents the lives of women as workers, caregivers, and sportswomen over the course of the twentieth century.

How many know that two women raced in the America's Cup as early as the 1930s? Or that early women workers in the telephone company were also active volunteers in the Red Cross during World War I? And, how has the representation of women-as models in boat shows, for example-evolved alongside the development of the Rosenfelds' photographic careers?Using her expertise in Women's Studies, Margaret L. Andersen Rosenfeld includes interpretive essays to accompany these images, thus illuminating the social and historical context that frames these photographs.

Included here are images of both ordinary and exceptional women.

Beginning with the thrill that little girls find on boats and continuing with depicting women in the early days of the telephone industry, the volunteer work women did in World War I, and women's roles as athletes, models, and sailors, these extraordinary photographs chronicle the social history of women's lives at a time when the Rosenfelds were documenting maritime history.

On Land and On Sea reveals a dimension of the Rosenfeld Collection that can be mined for further historical research.