The Schlesinger Library’s manuscript holdings document women’s lives and women’s issues currently and retrospectively with greatest strengths in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Especially well represented are suffrage and women’s rights, the post-World War II feminist movement, social reform, health and sexuality, work, and professions. The library’s more than 3,500 manuscript collections include the letters, diaries, photographs, scrapbooks, and other papers of notable American women such as Susan B. Anthony, Julia Child, Amelia Earhart, Betty Friedan, Emma Goldman, Pauli Murray, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and June Jordan. In addition, the papers of many “unknown” women illuminate the experiences of their daily lives across centuries and geography.

Family papers—those of the well-known Blackwell and Hamilton families but also those of families known only to their own members—include correspondence from budding courtships, poignant letters home from far away, and scrawled notes from summer camp. The minutes, correspondence, newsletters, and other records of active and defunct women’s organizations and of groups and agencies concerned with women’s issues, such as the Boston and Cambridge YWCAs, the National Organization for Women, Boston-area settlement houses, Lamaze, and Wider Opportunities for Women, reveal the wide variety of women’s interests and the zeal with which they have pursued them.

Portrait of Susan B. Anthony, 1871. Photo by Sarony's. From the Susan B. Anthony Papers (A143-3-5).
Flyer for a poetry reading by June Jordan, n.d. From the June Jordan Papers.
Blackwell and Spofford family portrait, ca. 1880. From the Woman's Rights Collection (WRC-1052a-4).
ERA sticker. From the National Women's Political Caucus Records.