Author and poet Evelyn (Perkins) Ames was born in 1908, the daughter of Henry A. and Olga (Flinch) Perkins. A graduate of Milton Academy in Milton, Mass., in 1925, she then studied at Vassar College (1926-1929). She was the author of Only the Loving (1952), My Brother Bird (1954), The Hawk from Heaven (1957), and Dust on a Precipice (1980). She was a member of the Poetry Society of America, Pen and Brush, and New York Women Poets.

Beaton was a music teacher, dramatic coach, and painter before devoting herself to writing. She was a member of the Catholic Poetry Society of America and her work was published in various Boston newspapers, the Philadelphia Bulletin, and the Australian News.

A poet, teacher, and peace activist, Cora Brooks graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and earned certificates in child sexual abuse intervention and American Sign Language. She taught writing at Goddard, Lesley, and Wheaton colleges and published her poetry in a number of journals and collections of verse. She also taught poetry and writing in the public schools in Massachusetts and Vermont and worked as a tutor with children with special needs in Montpelier, Vermont. She was a director of Chelsea (Vermont) Help for Battered Women. Brooks is also a longtime activist, demonstrating against nuclear power, the Vietnam War, and the reinstatement of the draft; she was arrested on numerous occasions but charges were dismissed.

Poet, editor, and teacher Kinereth D. Gensler grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and in Jerusalem. She graduated from the University of Chicago (B.A. 1943) and Columbia University (M.A. 1946). Gensler taught poetry in workshops for elementary school children in Massachusetts (1971-1975) and was a poetry instructor at the Radcliffe Seminars for more than twenty years, beginning in 1978. She was an editor at Alice James Books (1976-1999), was poet-in-residence at Manhattanville College, and had residencies at the Ragdale Foundation (1981) and at the MacDowell Colony (1982-1983). She was the author of Without Roof (1981) and Journey Fruit (1997), among others. This collection includes family and professional correspondence, drafts of poems, published writings, notes, genealogical materials and photographs of family, and audiocassettes of readings.

A socialist and deist, Gilman was an independent thinker, author, and speaker who was an intellectual leader of the women’s movement from the late 1890s through the mid-1920s. An advocate of economic independence for women, she considered the ballot of secondary importance. Her interests ranged from sensible dress for women, physical fitness, more rational domestic architecture, and professionalized housework, to birth control, Freud, and immigrants. Her first published work was the poem "One Girl of Many," which appeared in The Alpha, probably in 1880; the Woman's Journal also published some of her verse in the 1880s. In 1893 a book of her poems, In This Our World, was published. She launched her own monthly magazine, The Forerunner, in 1909. She wrote, edited, and published it virtually single-handedly until 1916. It included serialized books and numerous stories, articles, reviews, and poems, always emphasizing her ideas about economics, ethics, women's rights, and child-rearing. The Schlesinger holds a wide breadth of material related to Gilman, much of which has been digitized. Please see the Charlotte Perkins Gilman research guide for more information about accessing the digitized materials.

Susan Griffin was a poet, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter. As an eco-feminist she has described her work as drawing "connections between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women, and racism." Through her books, plays, and poetry she addresses many contemporary issues, including climate change, war, colonialism, the body, democracy, and terrorism. Her books include Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978), Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature (1981), and The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society (1995). She is also a founding member of a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice organization, Code Pink.

Katharine Butler Hathaway, a writer, was born in 1890 in Baltimore, Maryland. She spent her childhood in Salem, Massachusetts, where she suffered tuberculosis of the spine and had to lie flat on her back for ten years. Her education consisted of one year at Abbot Academy in Andover and another year at Miss McClintock's School in Boston. She attended Radcliffe and then lived in Blue Hill, Maine, with her husband. She wrote autobiographical works, children's stories, and poems. Her published works include Mr. Muffet's Cat and Her Trip to Paris (1934), The Little Locksmith (1943), and The Journals and Letters of The Little Locksmith (1946).

June Jordan was an award-winning author, poet, and social and political activist. She wrote both fiction and nonfiction, and in the late 1960s she began reading her poetry at paid engagements arranged by the American Academy of Poets. Concurrently, Jordan embarked on her pedagogical career, working as a lecturer and adjunct faculty member at several institutions. By the early 1970s Jordan concentrated her efforts more fully on writing and teaching, using her talents to address issues of discrimination based on race and gender, as well other politically controversial issues. She accepted a tenured position at SUNY Stony Brook (1978-1989) where she also served as director of the Poetry Center and the Creative Writing Program. In 1988 she accepted a joint appointment as Professor of African American Studies and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. There, she developed a program called "Poetry for the People" which conducted community workshops. See also June Jordan Audio Collection and June Jordan Videotape Collection.

Early in her career, Merriam worked as a copy writer and a fashion editor of Glamour and conducted a weekly radio show about poetry on WQXR, New York. Her first book of verse, Family Circle, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Other books of poetry include The Nixon Poems, The Double Bed, and The Inner City Mother Goose. Although primarily a poet, Merriam was also a playwright, teacher, and lecturer, particularly on the subjects of education, the status of women, and poetry. She wrote satire, fiction, children's books, biographies (including one of Emma Lazarus), and the precedent-setting After Nora Slammed the Door, one of the early works of second-wave feminist writing. She read her poems on radio and television as well as in films and theaters; and her writings appeared in periodicals abroad and in the New York Times, The Nation, the New Republic, and the Ladies' Home Journal, as well as in many anthologies. See also Eve Merriam Audiovisual Collection.

Honor Moore is a poet and author who attended Radcliffe College (B.A. 1967) and the Yale School of Drama (1967-1969). She has published several volumes of poetry, Memoir (1988), Darling (2001), and Red Shoes (2005), in addition to the chapbook Leaving and Coming Back (1981). Her poems and essays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies. She edited Poems from the Women's Movement (2009), and has translated and/or edited several other volumes of poetry, including Amy Lowell: Selected Poems (2004) and The Stray Dog Cabaret (2007). Books include The White Blackbird (1996), a biography of Moore's grandmother, painter Margarett Sargent McKean; and The Bishop's Daughter: A Memoir (2008), about her relationship with her father.

Interested in writing and poetry from an early age, Mor received her BA in English from San Diego State University in 1969. She began graduate studies in linguistics before leaving the university to independently study ancient matriarchies and women's prehistory, influences that played a strong role in her later work and life. Mor, who had three children, was homeless and on welfare for extended periods of her life but took on editorial and teaching jobs whenever possible. Her first two books of poems were published in the 1970s: Bitter Root Rituals (1975) and Mother Tongue (1977), with a third, Winter Ditch and Other Poems, published in 1982. Mor's best known book is The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (1987), a cross-disciplinary study examining evidence of women's roles as first practitioners of early cultural belief and exploring the Goddess religion. Much of her later work derived from her experiences on the street, focusing on the struggle to survive in an uncaring and violent world, with The Blue Rental published in 2011 and The Victory of Sex and Metal posthumously published in 2015.

Noble was a poet and translator who studied languages and the fine arts at Radcliffe College (A.B. 1909). Later she translated writings of the Russian poet Constantine Balḿont and the diary of the Russian officer Constantine Belash, as well as French articles, which were published in Eastern and Western Review. In addition, Noble wrote articles and poetry for the Review and lectured at the Congregational Church in Salem and other places. After her death Noble's poems were published by her family.

Janice Oberacker was a good friend of poet May Sarton during the years she lived in York, Maine. In 1980 they traveled to Europe together on the Queen Elizabeth II. This collection contains writings and other materials relating to Sarton.

Parallels: Artists/Poets was an exhibition featuring work by women poets displayed with works on paper by artists Claire Heimarck, Oriole Farb Feshbach, and Lucy D. Rosenfeld. It traveled to New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut from 1993 to 1995, and explored the responses and affinities of the three artists to poems by twentieth-century women writers. The exhibition was shown at the Schlesinger Library in June 1995. This collection includes the exhibition catalog, correspondence and publicity concerning the show, and information from poets and artists.

Parker was an African American feminist lesbian poet who gave her first public poetry reading in 1963. Her first book of poetry, Child of Myself, appeared in 1972, followed by Pit Stop in 1973. In 1976 Parker and Judy Grahn released a phonograph album, Where Would I Be Without You. In 1978 Parker became director of Oakland's Feminist Women's Health Center, and in 1980 she founded the Black Women's Revolutionary Council. Other works included Womanslaughter (1978), Movement in Black: The Collected Poetry of Pat Parker, 1961-1978 (1978), and Jonestown and Other Madness (1985). Parker died in 1989 of breast cancer.

An abstract painter, poet, and philosopher, Pereira was a major figure in the art world from 1930. She worked with the WPA Federal Art Project in New York from 1935 to 1939; in the 1940s she experimented with new media (glass, plexiglass, and plastic) of the constructivist school; and in the 1950s she returned to paint and canvas. She published numerous books on aesthetics and the philosophy of art. This collection includes her poems.

A poet, author, feminist, and teacher (Radcliffe College, B.A., 1951), Rich won the Yale Younger Poets Award with the publication of her first book in 1951. Over the course of her career she published numerous books of poetry and prose. She received many additional awards, taught writing and women's studies at a number of colleges, and lectured on feminism at conferences and universities in the U.S. and abroad. She was also the editor, with Michelle Cliff, of Sinister Wisdom (1981-83).

Poet and novelist May Sarton was born in Belgium and immigrated to the U.S. with her parents in 1916. Sarton pursued a career in theater as an actress and published her first book of poems in 1937. This collection consists of an oral history with Sarton which gives an autobiographical, chronological, and detailed account of her life. She talks with critic and writer Carolyn G. Heilbrun about her "influences, muses, and lovers" and describes how she began writing and the people who inspired her poetry.

Vice president for legislation of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and a founder of the Buffalo, N.Y., chapter of NOW, Ann (London) Scott graduated from the University of Washington (B.A. 1952, Ph.D. 1970). A poet and translator, she was an editor of Poetry Northwest while in Seattle and taught English literature and composition at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1965-1972). After her election to NOW's national board in 1970, she devised much of the organization's lobbying strategy for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and wrote about sex discrimination in business and at colleges and universities.

Poet Anne Sexton was the author of many collections of poems, including To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), All My Pretty Ones (1962), and Live or Die (1966), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. Known for her confessional verse, Sexton suffered nervous breakdowns following the births of her daughters Linda Gray and Joyce Ladd Sexton. She was encouraged by her doctor to pursue an interest in writing poetry that she had developed during high school. In 1957 she joined a poetry workshop where she met poet Maxine Kumin and began an 18-year career, publishing eight books of poetry and one play. Her poems offer readers an intimate view of the anguish that characterized her life, which ended in suicide in 1974.

Sparrow was a sculptor, author and poet who studied in both the U.S. and Europe. Her first husband, Captain Herbert G. Sparrow, died after the grounding of the USS Tacoma in 1924; the tragedy was the subject of her book The Last Cruise (1926). Her sculptures, portraits, and busts were widely exhibited and received both national and international awards. In addition to her own published poetry, her work includes poetry translations.

Jean Valentine attended Milton Academy Girls School and received her B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1956. In December 1955, a Harvard University student publication, The Harvard Advocate, published her "Poem," which received a favorable review in the Harvard Crimson. In 1964, a collection of her poems won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, chosen over 300 other entries; it was published in 1965 as Dream Barker and Other Poems. Valentine has taught poetry at many colleges and universities and has also won numerous awards and fellowships, including the Rockefeller Fellowship, the Bunting Institute Fellowship, the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and the National Book Award for Poetry (2004).

Poet and educator Ruth Whitman graduated from Radcliffe College (B.A. 1944) and Harvard University (M.A. 1947). She has served on the faculties of Harvard, Tufts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Massachusetts, and she was founder and president of Poets Who Teach, Inc. She is the author of Blood and Milk Poems (1963), The Passion of Lizzie Borden: New and Selected Poems (1973), Tamsen Donner: A Woman's Journey (1977), and Laughing Gas: Poems, New and Selected (1991).

Wilcox was a poet and journalist. Her poems, although popular with the general public, were judged facile and sentimental by critics. She also wrote plays and newspaper articles. In later life she became interested in spiritualism.

A journalist and creative writer, Willis published poems, short stories, and articles in many magazines in the 1920s-1940s. She was also a script writer for Twentieth Century Fox when married to her second husband, John Speaks, an executive producer at RKO Studios. In later life, she was active in the civil rights movement, serving on the executive board of the Bridgeport-Stamford NAACP.