Collections

The Black Women Oral History Project interviewed 72 African American women between 1976 and 1981.

A suffragist, a women’s rights activist, and the author of the original Equal Rights Amendment, Alice Paul (1885–1977) devoted her entire life advocating for women’s suffrage and equal rights for women. She was the main architect of the campaign in the 1910s to pass the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which gave women the right to vote.

The Beecher-Stowe Family was a prominent New England family noted for its contributions in the fields of education, religion, social reform, and literature.

Best known as an iconic women’s rights activist who played a pivotal role in the campaign for women’s suffrage, Susan B. Anthony (1820‒1906) was also involved in a number of other 19th century social reform movements, including temperance, abolition, and labor rights. The library has digitized several small collections of her papers, consisting of correspondence, diaries, and speeches along with photographs, inscribed books, and related memorabilia.

The extraordinary Blackwell family, four generations of whom are represented in these papers, played important roles in 19th and 20th century American social reform movements: abolition of slavery, women’s rights, woman’s suffrage, and temperance. For more than a century and across generations, the Blackwells offered each other advice on courtship, marriage, finances, domestic relations, health, and childrearing. In addition to personal and family matters, these documents highlight the important issues the Blackwell family confronted.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was many things throughout her life: philosopher, artist, novelist, lecturer, mother, divorcée, editor, suffragist, journalist, wife, invalid, and publisher. She was a popular and influential public figure who tirelessly worked against women's inequality inside and outside the home, and she wrote about the social changes she thought necessary to achieve gender equality. She is the author of the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper."

Dorothy West, born in Boston in 1907, moved to New York City in 1925 at the age of 18 and became the youngest among a group of artists and writers working in the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes nicknamed her “the kid.”

The Helen Augusta Whittier Album illustrates the experience of four well-educated, upper-class women from the Lowell, Massachusetts, area who set off for a two-week adventure in a ramshackle cottage on remote Great Brewster Island in Boston Harbor.