Architect and author Elisabeth Coit studied at Radcliffe College and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts School and received her B.S. in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1919. She was draftsman-designer in the office of Grosvenor Atterbury in New York and then maintained her own office in New York. She was the first woman to receive the Langley Award from the American Institute of Architects, (1938-1940) for research on U.S. low-income housing. Coit was also architect and technical standards editor for the Federal Public Housing Authority's publication, Public Housing Design; principal planner for the New York City Housing Authority; and a prolific writer on housing. The professional papers in this collection are mainly architectural drawings and photographs of Coit's projects (1925-1972) and her publications on housing (1935-1969); it also includes extensive correspondence with Greek architect Cleon Crantonellis (1947-1974) and other correspondence.

Social historian and editor Jane Davison wrote frequently about houses and architecture and was the author of The Fall of a Doll's House: Three Generations of American Women and the Houses They Lived In and This Old House, a book based on the public television series by the same name. A graduate of Smith College (1955), Davison worked as an editor in New York for Mademoiselle, Anchor-Doubleday, and New York University Press, as well as in Boston, at Harvard University Press. She wrote regularly for the New York Times Magazine on architectural and social subjects during the 1970s, as well as on the gentrification of urban places such as Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston.

Founded in 1892 in Boston's South End by a small group of college-educated women, Denison House was a settlement house that offered camps, clubs, sports for girls and boys, classes, a library and clinic, union organization, and other services for the neighborhood's mixed nationalities. In 1942 the House was moved to the Dorchester-Roxbury area and in 1965 it merged with three other settlements to form Federated Dorchester Neighborhood Houses. Organizers included Emily Greene Balch, Helen Cheever, Vida Scudder, and Helena Dudley, who was head worker between 1893 and 1912. For nearly two years, beginning in 1926, Amelia Earhart was a social worker and resident, working with children and adults as a teacher and home visitor.

Mary Palache Gregory was born in Weston, Massachusetts. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College (1924) and from the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Design (1927). She worked for landscape architects Rose Greely and Beatrix Farrand in New York City and for architect Fred Keck in Chicago. She also worked independently as an architect.

Elinor C. Guggenheimer, a public official and civic worker, was educated at Vassar and Barnard (AB 1934). From 1961-1968, as a member of the New York City Planning Commission, Guggenheimer was involved with many aspects of the planning and organization of the parks system and also lectured and wrote on urban recreation and park planning. This collection consists of Guggenheimer's articles, speeches, and correspondence and relates to her activities in New York City government (Parks, Planning and Consumer Affairs).

An award-winning author, poet, and social and political activist, June Jordan became dedicated to urban development in the 1960s. She worked as a researcher for Mobilization for Youth, Inc., on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and collaborated with R. Buckminster Fuller on an architectural re-design of Harlem. With Fuller's support, Jordan received an award for creative writing from the Rockefeller Foundation (1969), as well as a Prix de Rome in Environmental Design (1970). This collection includes materials relating to equitable housing.

Born in Tokyo, Japan, of missionary parentage, Maryal Knox early showed an interest in people and in service to them. Returning to Rye, New York in 1893, she graduated from Wellesley College in 1901. Soon she turned to settlement work in New York. For over thirty years she was associated with the 110th Street Neighborhood Club, and in 1952 was honored for fifty years in social work. This collection contains correspondence, photos, pamphlets, articles, and minutes (1953-1954) of the East Harlem Council for Community Planning.

Carol Riegelman Lubin was born in Montclair, New Jersey. She received a B.A. from Smith College where she graduated with honors in 1930, and an M.A. in international relations from Columbia University in 1933. She later completed a PhD. in public law and administration from Columbia University. Lubin served as a community planner for the City of Reston, Virginia (1961-1967), and from the late 1960s through the 1980s was a consultant and executive staff member for a number of social welfare organizations concerned with women, children, housing, and unemployment, including the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the New York Urban Coalition, and United Neighborhood Houses. This collection includes documents relating to her work with United Neighborhood Houses of New York, the New York Urban Coalition, and other organizations.

Elva Jean Spiess Marshall graduated from the University of California, Berkeley (B.A. 1944) and went on to earn a certificate in city planning from the same university in 1945. During the 1940s and early 1960s, Marshall worked as a planning draftsman, preparing maps, charts, and illustrations for reports, and she eventually became a city planner in both Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Pasadena, California. This collection includes material related to Marshall's employment as a city planner and book designer/editor. Booklets, reports, and correspondence document Marshall's work for the City of Cambridge Planning Board.

Founded in 1879 to provide a means of self-help for the poor, the North End Industrial Home first established a sewing room managed and staffed mainly by women for women. In 1885 the School was incorporated under its present name to serve the surrounding immigrant community, which after 1900 was mainly Italian. It aimed to help the immigrants become citizens and improve their economic conditions. In addition to the sewing room, the School offered other vocational courses for children and adults, a day nursery and Play School for Habit Training, a library, clubs, outings, pageants, summer camps, a credit union, and an industrial training program. Vocational guidance and placement were initiated before WWI but were emphasized particularly during the Depression, when the School helped run a work relief program for the unemployed. After both world wars the School participated in government programs to train veterans and handicapped persons, and it has been active in civic improvement projects in the North End.

A prominent Boston-area family, the Richardson-Hemenway family was descended from merchants (Hemenways) and textile manufacturers (Lawrences), and was related to the Appletons, Cabots, Coolidges, and Higginsons. The collection centers around John Richardson (Harvard 1908), a lawyer and major figure in the Republican Party, and his wife, Hope (Hemenway) Richardson. Series III, Interstate 95 Expansion Protest, 1944-1976, includes correspondence, notes, reports, meeting notices, maps, and printed material relating to their opposition to Interstate 695, the proposed expansion of Interstate 95, which was slated to pass through Canton and Milton, Massachusetts, near the Richardsons' home. Also included are printed materials addressing land conservation.

A settlement worker and housing reformer, Simkhovitch received a B.A. from Boston University in 1890 and did graduate work at Radcliffe, the University of Berlin, and Columbia. She was one of the organizers of the Association of Neighborhood Workers (1901) and a founder and first director of Greenwich House, a settlement house in Greenwich Village, New York. This collection includes papers relating to the New York Housing Authority (1934-1948), Greenwich House, and some of Simkhovitch’s other professional affiliations.

A graduate of Cornell (B.Arch., 1953) and Harvard (Ed.M., 1976), Sprague was an architect and planner with a particular interest in designing and developing housing to serve low-income women and children. She was the cofounder of the Women's Institute for Housing and Economic Development (Boston), the Women's Development Corporation (Providence, R.I.), the Women's Design Center, and Open Design Office, an office of women architects and planners in Cambridge, Mass. She was the author of A Development Primer (1984), A Manual on Transitional Housing (1985), Taking Action: A Comprehensive Approach to Housing Women and Children in Massachusetts (1988), and More than Housing (1991).

Mary Endicott Tree, known as Marietta, was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on April 12, 1917, and attended the University of Pennsylvania. Deeply interested in politics and social issues, Tree worked with Dorothy Paley, William Paley's first wife, to establish a nursery school in Harlem and to found Sydenham Hospital, the first multi-racial hospital in the United States. In 1968 she became a partner in the urban planning company Llewelyn-Davies Associates, and she was an active (and sometimes the only female) member of many committees and boards, including the Citizens Committee for New York City and Central Broadcasting Station (CBS). She also worked as a consulting editor and scout for Architectural Digest. The collection documents Tree's private and professional life, including her political activities and work as an urban planner and for a number of committees and boards.

Pearl Katz Wise, a Cambridge, Mass., public official, had a long political career in local government. She was born in Kovno, Russia, in 1900 or 1901 and immigrated to Boston with her mother and two older siblings in 1905. In 1955 she was the first woman to be elected to the City Council under Cambridge's Plan E charter form of government. She served four terms. During her last term, Wise cast the deciding vote against a controversial East Cambridge renewal project. Her vote saved 115 houses in the Wellington-Harrington area from demolition. Her actions also initiated neighborhood participation in urban planning. After retiring from the City Council, Wise served on the Citizens' Advisory Committee of the Massachusetts Department of Elder Affairs and was the first woman appointed to the Cambridge Housing Authority, where she supported tenant associations and the Model Cities Program.