Jane Frances (McCall) Babson was the first member of her family to graduate from high school. She received her BA in art and archaeology from Mount Holyoke College in 1947 and then studied art and art history at the University of Illinois, Urbana (MFA, 1949). Babson moved to New York City after earning her MFA, hoping to find work in the art field. In 1952, she moved to Washington, DC, where she worked as registrar for the Corcoran Gallery of Art. She married and had two children. After her second child entered kindergarten, Babson resumed her artistic studies and began exhibiting and selling her work at local art shows in Connecticut. Babson founded the Winstead Press, a small-press publisher of children's books, which she managed until 2010. She was active in library and small press associations, serving as secretary of the New York Independent Publishers Association.

Artist, feminist, and workshop leader Suzanne Benton graduated from Queens College, City University of New York (B.A. 1956). She is a printmaker, sculptor, and mask performance artist who has traveled widely, bringing her art to all corners of the world and exploring the healing and transformative power of art through mask making and storytelling workshops. The author of Dear Friends and Allies: The Journey Letters of a Traveling Artist (2001), Benton has exhibited around the world and was awarded a Fulbright lectureship to India (1992-1993). She was a founding member of two Connecticut chapters of the National Organization for Women (NOW) (1969) and served as president of Western Connecticut NOW (1970-1973).

A feminist artist and curator, June Blum studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and was active in the women's art movement in the New York City area in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As curator of contemporary art at the Suffolk Museum in Stony Brook, New York (1971-1975), Blum created Unmanly Art, which was followed by Works on Paper, a show for women artists at the Brooklyn Museum in 1975. In 1975 she founded Women Artists Living in Brooklyn and in 1980 the East Central Women's Caucus for Art. Blum painted Betty Friedan for The Sister Chapel, a feminist art installation. She has exhibited widely and has been instrumental in bringing the work of women artists to the public.

Artist and educator Jocelyn (Levine) Brodie was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she graduated from Brooklyn Ethical Culture School. She later attended Cooper Union Art School (1947-1949) and graduated from Bennington College (BA 1951) and Keene State College (M.Ed 1970). In the 1950s she studied, painted, and exhibited in Europe and New York, and in 1955 she married artist Gandy Brodie. In 1961 they moved to Vermont, forming the Gandy Brodie School of Fine Arts. Jocelyn Brodie taught art and directed the Newfane Gallery in Newfane, Vermont, and the Thorne Memorial Art Gallery in Keene, New Hampshire, and was active in numerous cultural organizations in Vermont and New Hampshire. In 1967 Brodie began a correspondence with urbanist and cultural critic Lewis Mumford when she wrote him about creating a children's book based on his Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization.

Artist Fay Martin Chandler was born in 1923. She graduated from Sweet Briar College in Amherst, Virginia (B.A. 1943). Fay Chandler studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and earned an M.F.A. in painting in 1967 from the Maryland Institute of Art. She was a founder of the Art Connection, a Boston-based organization that places artwork in local hospitals, halfway houses, and schools. Chandler has had over thirty solo exhibitions and her work is included in the collections at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia.

Chapin was a sculptor whose work, notably stone models of birds and animals, was exhibited around the U.S. and in Paris beginning in 1930. She learned the art of direct carving from Mateo Hernandez in Paris in 1934, was the only foreign and female sculptor elected to the Societaire Salon d'Automne, Paris (1936), and was accepted as a member of the National Academy of Design in 1945. She won many awards and prizes for her sculpture in the 1930s and 1940s.

Chicago is an artist, feminist, and writer. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of California, Los Angeles, where she received her M.F.A. degree in 1964. Earning considerable recognition for her minimalist sculptures in an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1967), she also had a one-woman show at California State University at Fullerton (1970). Increasingly sensitive to the need for an environment in which women artists could express themselves freely without regard to the male-dominated art world, Chicago pioneered feminist art education programs at California State University at Fresno (1969-1971) and at the California Institute of the Arts (1971-1973), where she and artist Miriam Shapiro directed an installation called Womanhouse (1971). In 1973 she organized the Feminist Studio Workshop, the first independent feminist art education program in the country. Chicago is best known for The Dinner Party, a multimedia installation honoring the achievements of women in Western civilization. Executed between 1974 and 1979 with the participation of hundreds of volunteers, The Dinner Party was viewed by approximately one million people in exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad between 1979 and 1988. See also Additional papers of Judy Chicago and the Videotape collection of Judy Chicago. Digitized content is available through the finding aids for these collections and through the Judy Chicago Collaboration portal. The Letters of Mary Ross Taylor include correspondence between Taylor and Chicago.

Serigraphic artist Corita Kent was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, as Frances Elizabeth Kent. In 1936, she joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles, taking the name Sister Mary Corita. After graduating from the University of Southern California, where she studied art with Charles and Ray Eames, Corita began teaching art at the Immaculate Heart College (IHC), a Catholic liberal arts women's college in Hollywood, California, run by the Immaculate Heart Sisters of Los Angeles. She left the order in 1968 and moved to Boston to pursue a full-time career as an artist. She received commissions from Boston Gas to design a mural for their 150-ft gas tank, from the Physicians for Social Responsibility to design various peace billboards, and from the United States Postal Service to design the 22-cent Love Stamp. Corita died on September 18, 1986 in Boston, Massachusetts.

A sculptor and inventor, Hosmer was a native of Watertown, Mass. She studied anatomy and spent much of her life in Rome, where she was at first the pupil of the English sculptor, John Gibson. Her works were exhibited and purchased in England and the United States. The collection includes correspondence, poetry, manuscripts, speeches, dramas, sketches, drawings, notes on art, articles, photographs, and clippings of Hosmer, as well as the papers of her friend and biographer, Cornelia Crow Carr.

An artist, gallery owner, and antique dealer, Celia T. Hubbard was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She was the great-granddaughter of the poet and gardener Celia Thaxter. Following study at the Boston Museum School (1939-1942), she worked in New York City for two advertising agencies and as assistant art director for Mademoiselle. In 1948 she left for Europe to design sets and costumes for ballet companies, including the Grand Ballet du Marquis De Cuevas. While in France she converted to Catholicism and was inspired to bring Christ to the world through art.

Artist and photographer Glenda Hydler was born in Newark, N.J., and attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City (B.F.A.) and California State University at Northridge (B.A.). In the 1970s she began creating loose-leaf books containing pages alternating between text and photographs, which sought to capture the rhythm of her emotional and experiential life. The books are autobiographical, mirroring her developing feminism, and address social politics, sexuality, and relationships, among other things.

Artist, writer, and lesbian activist Kady Vandeurs was born in Pensacola, Florida, the daughter of George and Ann Shepard Vandeurs. She published articles in Big Mama Rag, the New Women's Times, and Off Our Backs and studied design, painting, and graphic art at Greenfield (Massachusetts) Community College. She participated in the Women's Pentagon Action (1980-1981) and at the Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace & Justice near Seneca Falls, New York (1983).

A sculptor (Radcliffe, A.B., 1929), Kline has exhibited her work, primarily stone, wood and bronze animals, in many group shows and in two one-woman exhibitions in New York City. This collection includes photos of her sculptures and materials pertaining to exhibitions in which she participated.

Koehler was an artist and jeweler. She exhibited ceramics in the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and briefly established an interior decorating business in Chicago. In March 1898, she went abroad to study enameling and jewelry-making with Alexander Fisher in London. From 1898 to 1900 she shared a studio with Miss Waite, a friend from Hull-House, held classes in china painting, and worked in jewelry and metals. She later accompanied Erica (Crane) Chadbourne on a trip around the world, settled in London with her, and had a studio in Kensington. In 1910 she exhibited her jewelry with William Rothenstein and was acclaimed by Roger Fry. In 1912 she moved to Paris, where she concentrated on drawing and painting and purchased fine arts and furniture on commission for patrons in America. Her social circle included artists and writers such as Henry James, Augustus John, and Henri Matisse.

Marge was a cartoonist best known as the creator of Little Lulu, a character and comic strip that first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in February 1935 and ran weekly for the next ten years. Merchandizing and advertising campaigns soon followed, and in 1944 Marge signed a contract with Kleenex. In 1943 the first of twenty-eight animated cartoons appeared, followed by the first comic book, initially drawn and written by Western Publishing staff cartoonist John Stanley. By the late 1940s Marge managed a merchandizing empire, approving all Lulu appearances although she only drew Lulu for the Kleenex campaign. See also Michele Maki Collection on Little Lulu.

Meredith was a photographer, artist, filmmaker, and performance artist. Most of her career in photography was spent documenting the lives of women, gay and lesbian life, and her family. Many of her photographic exhibits were accompanied by lectures, slide shows, documentary films, and/or performance pieces. Meredith was also the recipient of a Lila Wallace--Reader's Digest International Artist Fellowship, for which she documented the lives of Kenyan villagers in Ruma.

Author, artist, and journalist Elizabeth Winthrop (Day) Moulton graduated from Radcliffe College in 1946 and moved to New York City, where she began work as a feature assistant for Mademoiselle magazine. In 1949 she left Mademoiselle and became a freelance writer under the name of Betsy Day. Her first novel, Fatal Demonstrations, appeared in 1980, and she had completed five more--all unpublished--by the time of her death in 2013. Moulton’s artistic skills are reflected in sketches and watercolors included in the collection.

Parallels: Artists/Poets was an exhibition featuring work by women poets displayed with works on paper (collage, prints, watercolor, pastels, photography) 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, Radcliffe College, in June 1995. This collection includes the exhibition catalog; correspondence, publicity, etc., concerning the show; and biographies, resumes, and statements by poets and artists.

An abstract painter, poet, and philosopher, Pereira was a major figure in the art world from 1930. She worked with the Works Progress Administration 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.

Sparrow was a sculptor and poet. This collection contains diaries, poems and translations by Sparrow of foreign poetry, manuscripts of autobiographical novels and other writings, photos and sketches of her sculpture, and correspondence pertaining to her sculpture and writing. It also includes some family correspondence and photos, genealogical information, scrapbooks, albums and memorabilia, and material concerning her escape from France prior to the German occupation during WWII.

Sculptor and landscape painter Katharine Beecher Stetson was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the daughter of feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman and artist Charles W. Stetson. She studied in Rome, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and with sculptor Frank Tolles Chamberlin, whom she later married. Most of this collection documents Stetson's life as an artist and mother, and as a child and caretaker of her parents.

Visible for a Change: Contemporary Lesbian Artists, U.S.A., was a slide-show installation that was part of the Sixth Annual Colloquium Series on Gender, Culture, and Society sponsored by the Committee on Degrees in Women's Studies, Harvard University, February 6 - March 3, 1991. This collection consists of slides of work by participating artists as well as biographical information.

Weems was an animal sculptor. She attended Miss May's School for Girls and studied sculpting at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with Frederick Allen and Charles Grafly. She also received criticism and encouragement from animal sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington. Weems was elected to the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors in 1925 and to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1952. She began to show her work in 1920 and gained a national reputation when Narcisse Noir, a sculpture of a whippet, won the George D. Widener Memorial Gold Medal.

Sarah Wyman Whitman, an artist and civic volunteer, studied art in Boston under William Morris Hunt. Her stained glass, book cover designs, and paintings were exhibited widely in Massachusetts and New York. She was active in guiding the development of Radcliffe College, served on the council of the Museum of Fine Arts School, Boston, and was president of the Woman's Auxiliary of the Massachusetts Civil Service Reform Association.

The daughter of Moses and Lucinda (Blood) Whittier, Helen Augusta Whittier was born in Lowell, Mass. She attended Lowell High School and Lasell Seminary (in Auburndale, Mass.) and taught china painting at the Lowell Evening Drawing School. She was also a founder of a club of fifteen friends known as XV, a group that pursued home-study courses under the guidance of Anna E. Ticknor. Whittier went on to be an active member of many organizations, including the Middlesex Women's Club of Lowell, the New England Women's Club, and the Massachusetts Federation of Women's Clubs.

Commercial artist Anita Parkhurst Willcox grew up in Chicago, where she studied at the Art Institute. Much of her work appeared on the covers of magazines such as Collier’s, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Delineator. She became known for creating images of the "New American Woman"–idealized pictures of young, fashionable, beautiful women. Willcox was the author of an unpublished book, Between Jobs and Babies. In the 1950s, Willcox and her husband were accused of being communists, and their work suffered as a result.

Wiseman is an artist, writer, teacher, and therapist. She has taught art and led art workshops for numerous institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, Massachusetts), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City), and the DeCordova Museum School (Lincoln, Massachusetts). She was program director at the Boston's Children's Museum and taught for twelve years in the Department of Expressive Therapies at Lesley College. Wiseman is known for her rag tapestries, kinetic sculptures, illustrated travel journals, and craft and activity books. Her work is part of the collections of the Hirschhorn Museum and Chase Manhattan Bank. Wiseman travels and lectures widely on creativity, dreams as metaphor, and body work. She is the director/designer for Ansayre Press.

The Woman's Building was founded in 1973 by artist Judy Chicago, graphic designer Sheila de Bretteville, and art historian Arlene Raven. Taking its name and inspiration from the Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Los Angeles Woman's Building was the first independent institution dedicated to women's cultural activities. Seeking to provide a public arena for sharing and honoring the artistic achievements of women, it offered studio space and classes in graphics and writing and sponsored lectures, exhibitions, conferences, and performances. The Woman's Building closed in 1992.