Fran Leeper Buss is an oral historian, teacher, activist, and former minister with the United Church of Christ. In the 1970s, Buss conducted her first oral history by interviewing Jesusita Aragon, a healer and midwife living in northern New Mexico. Since then she has interviewed numerous lower income women, union activists, and immigrant women throughout the United States. This collection includes notes and transcripts of some of Buss’s oral history interviews, including transcripts of interviews with Mexican-American labor leader Maria Elena Lucas.

Boston Women's Community Radio (BWCR) was founded in 1977 and incorporated as a non-profit in 1985. Beginning in 1978, BWCR's core staff and volunteers produced twenty-four hours of programming in commemoration of International Women's Day (IWD), which aired annually in March on WMBR-FM, a student radio station licensed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. BWCR served as an umbrella organization and training ground for feminist radio producers and local community groups, with many of the programs produced for the yearly event distributed afterwards to national audiences. The organization aimed for high-quality programming that was entertaining as well as informative, and both political and cultural in content. Shows discussed sensitive issues such as sexual abuse, lesbian equality, lesbian parenting, children of divorce, Palestinian rights, and women organizing in Central America; and they offered a musical blend of Latin American, African, jazz, rock, folk, and women's music, all highlighting women performers.

The Boston Women's Fund was founded in 1984 by a group of women frustrated with the devaluation of women by mainstream charities and also with the feminist movement's focus on issues important to white, middle-class women. The purpose of the Boston Women's Fund was to help women by providing both grants and training in fundraising and organizational development to grassroots women's organizations working to improve women's lives. It was the first women's foundation in Massachusetts. Between 1984 and 2016 the Boston Women's Fund gave grants to a wide variety of organizations, including Latinx organizations, working on issues such as welfare reform, health care, child care, domestic violence, reproductive rights, homelessness, immigrant rights, sexual harassment, homophobia, teen empowerment, and racism.

The Boston Women's Health Book Collective began in 1969 when a small group of women gathered after a workshop on women and their bodies at a Boston-area female liberation conference to talk about some crucial health issues and to confront a medical establishment viewed as paternalistic and condescending. Perhaps best known for their pioneering handbook Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971 and subsequent editions and international adaptations), the Collective helped to create worldwide networks of women involved in health education and advocacy. This collection includes information on Spanish and international translations of the Collective’s books. See also Additional Papers of Boston Women's Health Book Collective.

Physician and political activist Ana Livia Cordero was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, where her parents were professors at the University of Puerto Rico. She graduated from Columbia University Medical School in 1953, and in Puerto Rico she conducted a Rockefeller-funded research study to determine how to provide adequate medical care to the rural poor. In 1961 Cordero moved to Ghana, where she ran a women's health clinic and served as W.E.B. Du Bois's physician until his death in 1963. Cordero then returned to Puerto Rico, where she continued her work as a doctor and activist, advocating for Puerto Rican independence and serving as a representative of the Pro-Independence Movement to the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana. She was arrested for her activism in 1968. Cordero and her group, the Pilot Project, maintained connections with the African American liberation movement in the United States.

In 2007, Kathy Davis published The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders. In this book she detailed the history and global impact of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective's pioneering work, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and examined its influence on the women's health movement. In preparation for her book, Davis conducted a series of interviews with founders, leaders, and other activists in the Collective, some of whom were Latinx. This collection contains audiocassettes and some transcripts of the interviews, as well as audiocassettes from the conference Crossing Cultural Borders, at which international participants shared their experiences working on international and foreign language editions of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

A graduate of Harvard University (Ph.D. 2000), Mala Htun is an associate professor of political science at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Her work focuses on the initiatives and responses of countries with regard to gender, race, and ethnicity. A Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2002-2003), Htun is the author of Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies (2003), among others. This collection consists of her fieldwork notes from interviews, meetings, etc., in Latin America, as well as printed material and reports from women's rights organizations, mostly in Spanish or Portuguese.

The Schlesinger Library established an ad hoc Latina Advisory Committee in 1988 in order to improve the Library's documentation of the history and lives of Latina women. This advisory group was headed by Cecilia Soriano-Bresnahan and included prominent Latina women in the greater Boston area. The members attended an oral history workshop conducted by Ruth Hill, Schlesinger Library Oral History Coordinator, and in 1989, they commenced conducting interviews. Six participants were selected and interviews were then recorded, transcribed, and edited, and some transcriptions were translated from Spanish to English. Participants were generally college educated women. These interviews contain information regarding the lived experiences of the participants in relation to family, education, marriage, child rearing, culture, identity, cultural adjustment to the United States, and work.

This collection contains audiotapes, transcripts, and interview cards that served as research material for the documentary The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, which was produced in about 1980 by Connie Field and Clarity Educational Productions. The interviews are with women who worked in factories and shipyards, mostly welding and riveting, during World War II. There are also a handful of interviews with men who supervised or worked alongside the women. There are over one hundred and seventy interviewees, many of whom are Chicana, American Indian, and African American.

Chef, restaurateur, television host, and cookbook author Zarela Martinez was born in the Mexican border town of Agua Prieta in Sonora State. Her family owned a ranch and she was raised in a privileged atmosphere, while also learning how to kill rattlesnakes with a twelve foot whip and tame bucking broncos. Her mother wrote the cookbook Mexican Family Cooking. Martinez moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1973 and started a small catering business. In 1981, she met Paul Prudhomme, who invited her to cook at a gathering of the Confraire des Maîtres Cuisiniers at New York City's Tavern on the Green. This event greatly increased Martinez's prominence on the culinary scene. She moved to New York City in 1983, launched a new catering business, and in 1984 began working as a consultant and executive chef at Café Marimba, the first restaurant in New York to feature fine Mexican cuisine. In 1987, she opened the eponymous Zarela restaurant serving Mexican regional cuisines. The restaurant closed in 2011. She and her stepdaughter Marisa Sánchez Bastien opened Danzón in 2001, with a menu based on the food of Veracruz; it closed in 2002.

The National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) was formed in 1971 as a multiparty organization seeking to gain an equal voice and place for women in the political process at the local, state, and national levels. The Caucus and its state affiliates support women candidates for elective and appointive offices and seek to ensure that women hold policy-making positions in all political parties. The NWPC has lobbied in state legislatures for the Equal Rights Amendment, women's reproductive rights, and other measures to promote women's equality. This collection contains information about Latina presidents of the NWPC as well as about its work with Latinx women and organizations.

Education for Action, initiated in 1966 with a grant from the Ford Foundation, was unique among the social programs at Harvard and Radcliffe in that it combined action-oriented education with community work and other forms of public service. It was run by a multi-cultural student board with the assistance of a program coordinator and served as a meeting-place for socially-concerned students. It provided information, counseling, and funds for students to do research on, or participate in, social action projects. This collection includes materials relating to Latin American issues and Latinx student groups.

Playwright, novelist, and activist Ana María Simo was born in Cienfuegos, Cuba, and moved to Havana on the eve of the 1959 revolution. She began working as a journalist at age 15 and was 18 when her first book, The Fables, was published. Simo moved to Paris in 1967, studying sociology and linguistics, and was active in Gouines Rouges (Red Dykes), the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes, and the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire. In the mid-1970s she settled in New York, where she began writing in English and was associated with Maria Irene Fornes' experimental theater workshop. Many of her plays (Ted and Edna, Going to New England, Exiles, and Alma) were produced in New York at the INTAR Hispanic American Arts Center and other venues. She was the co-founder of Medusa's Revenge theater, the direct action group Lesbian Avengers, the national cable program Dyke TV, and The Gully online magazine. A short feature film, How to Kill Her, was widely screened at festivals in the United States and abroad.

Six Puerto Rican Women, a typescript by Isabel A. de Aguilar, depicts heroic women in Puerto Rican history who risked their own lives to relieve physical suffering, work for political independence, or advance women's emancipation. The six are Maria Rosario Bustamente, Mariana Bracetti, Ana Martinez Pumarejo, Josefa Gil de Lamadrid, Lola Rodriguez de Tio, and Ana Roque de Duprey.

Doris Stevens was active in organizations for the advancement of women both in the United States and internationally. She was a suffrage organizer and a member of the National Woman's Party and the Lucy Stone League, and she served as chair of the Inter-American Commission of Women (1928-1939). This collection includes correspondence with Latin American feminists and other materials relating to Latin American feminist organizations.

Feminist and civil rights leader Carmen Delgado Votaw was born in Puerto Rico in 1934. Active in the Overseas Education Fund of the League of Women Voters, she helped promote participation in community development for women in the United States and Latin America. In the mid-1970s, she was appointed to the Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year and served subsequently on the National Advisory Commission of Women, a presidential appointment. She also served as U.S. delegate to and as president of the Inter-American Commission of Women. Active in the National Organization for Women, the National Women's Political Caucus, the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women, and the Girl Scouts, Votaw also was president of the Pan American Liaison Committee of Women's Organizations.

This is a collection of women's newsletters and periodicals for which the Schlesinger Library holds three or fewer issues. It includes newsletters for organizations such as the National Network of Hispanic Women and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.

This collection consists of audiocassettes and transcripts of 56 oral histories conducted by Fran Leeper Buss with low-income and minority women of all ages from various geographic areas and racial/ethnic groups. Also included are field notes, photographs, and other supplemental material.