Ida Fisher Davidoff was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. She attended Simmons College and Radcliffe College, and later moved to Connecticut where she was active in the League of Women Voters, Hadassah, and the PTA. She went on to study family therapy at Yale, University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia, and she became an advocate for aging women. This small collection contains her memoir, which describes her childhood and Jewish community life in Boston. It also contains information about her college years, a trip to Europe she took with her husband, and her later work studying and teaching about women's life choices and old age.

In 1943 a group of non-Jews from Boston, Massachusetts worked to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis, and to provide homes for them in Palestine. Samuel Eliot, former president of the American Unitarian Association, lead this interfaith committee (initially titled Children of Palestine). After the war and the founding of the state of Israel, the group shifted its focus to creating understanding and respectful relationships between Jewish and Arab youth in Israel. This collection contains correspondence, minutes, publicity, photographs, videotapes, and other types of material related to the organization.

Rose Maybush Flax was born in the North End of Boston. She graduated from Salem State Normal School (now Salem State University) and taught in the Cambridge public schools until she married her high school sweetheart, Harold Julian Flax. Both the Flax and the Maybush families were active members of Temple Ashkenaz (now Beth Shalom) in Cambridge, and frequently hosted Jewish college students and visiting rabbis. Rose Flax was known for her cooking and baking, frequently holding meetings at her house for Hadassah, Hebrew College Women's Auxiliary, and Temple Askenaz sisterhood, among others. This collection consists of recipe cards, culinary pamphlets, and pamphlets giving instructions and recipes to be used with kitchen appliances. Some culinary pamphlets were also cataloged individually in the Culinary Pamphlets Collection.

Eva Fleischner was a pioneer in Jewish-Christian relations. Although she herself was a Catholic, she and her family fled Austria when she was a child because her father had converted to Catholicism from Judaism, and he feared Nazi persecution. She was a Radcliffe graduate, and author of The Christian and the Holocaust and Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, among other publications. She served on the board of the United States' Bishop's Office of Catholic-Jewish Relations and the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission. This collection includes her correspondence, talks and papers written by Fleischner, awards, publicity, and one videotaped interview with Fleischner taped in 2001.

Feminist, activist, and author Betty Goldstein Friedan (1921-2006) was a leading advocate for change in the status of women in the United States. Friedan was active in many feminist and political organizations, taught at several universities, lectured widely, and published numerous articles on gender and aging related issues until her death. This collection several items relevant to Friedan's work with the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies' task force on the role of Jewish women in a changing society and the Jewish Feminist Organization. This collection also contains an issue of Horizons, the newsletter of the Federation of Jewish Women's Organizations. There are two collections of additional papers of Betty Friedan, including the Additional Papers of Betty Friedan, 1937-1993 and the Additional Papers of Betty Friedan, 1941-2006. The Schlesinger also holds the Audio Collection of Betty Friedan and the Video Collection of Betty Friedan.

A civil rights, peace, feminist and lesbian activist, Vicki (Levins) Gabriner was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in a politically active family. In 1968 she moved to New York City to teach, and, during this time, joined the Weathermen. In 1970 Gabriner moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and helped to found the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance. In 1979 she moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where served as project coordinator for a women's oral history project at the Jewish Women's Archives (1998-1999). This collection documents Vicki Gabriner's radical political activism and life as a Jewish lesbian feminist, primarily in Atlanta, Georgia. The collection contains correspondence, notes, minutes, printed material and ephemera such as flyers and handouts, Gabriner's FBI and other surveillance files, and legal documents, as well as files on Gabriner's work with the Jewish Women's Archives and other Jewish projects in Massachusetts. There is very little personal material.

Poet, editor, and teacher Kinereth D. Gensler was born in New York City in 1922. Her mother was a dietician and worked for Hadassah and her father was a professor of education, and for a time served as a dean at Hebrew University in Israel. Gensler's younger sister Avima lived in Israel as an adult and founded an early education program there. Gensler grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and Jerusalem. She graduated from the University of Chicago and Columbia University. She married Walter Gensler and they had three children. The family lived in Belmont, Massachuetts, and Gensler taught poetry in workshops for elementary school children in Massachusetts, and was a poetry instructor at the Radcliffe Seminars for more than 20 years. This collection includes family and professional correspondence, drafts of poems, published writings, notes, and genealogical materials and photographs of family. These materials document Gensler's writing and teaching careers, her personal life and the lives of her husband and children, sister and parents.

Publicist, writer, and editor, Doris (Bauman) Gold was an editor for The Young Judaean magazine, a writer for the New York Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, and the founder Biblio Press. She was the Eastern Region coordinator for the National Organization for Women's Task Force on Volunteerism. Her papers held at the Schlesinger Library include both her published and unpublished articles, correspondence about Jewish women and their philanthropic organizations, her speeches and public statements, and material pertaining to NOW's task force on volunteerism.

Author, lecturer, educator, poet, and activist, Blu Greenberg has been a forerunner in the movement to bridge the gap between feminism and Orthodox Judaism since 1973. Greenberg grew up in a traditional Orthodox Jewish home. She is the author of several books, including On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition (1981) and How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household (1983). In 1997, she chaired the first International Conference on Feminism and Orthodoxy, and the second in 1998. Greenberg was co-founder and first president of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) and has served on the boards of numerous Jewish and feminist organizations. This collection includes correspondence, articles, notes for lectures and speeches, conference programs, meeting minutes, memoranda, research files, clippings, photographs, and audiovisual material. Relevant material can be found in the Audiovisual Collection of Blu Greenberg.

Nitza Rosovsky, curator at the Semitic Museum at Harvard, interviewed a number of Jewish graduates and alumni in 1986 as part of an exhibition in honor of Harvard's 350th anniversary. This collection includes both audiotapes and transcripts of 7 interviews.

Lilli Cohen Kretzmer was born in Germany, and studied law at the University of Bonn. She left Germany with her family in 1939, and settled in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1964 Kretzmer became Director of the Immigration and Naturalization Office of the Worcester Section of the National Council of Jewish Women; she also chaired the newly-created Resettlement Department, which worked with the Jewish Family Service to help Jewish refugees who came to the United States after World War II. In 1949 the Board of Immigration Appeals of the U.S. Department of Justice licensed Kretzmer to appear in court to handle immigration cases. This collection contains her memoir The Years Which the Locust Hath Eaten, a bound typescript, with a brief handwritten addendum. The narrative covers approximately the period from 1936 to 1945, and describes the events and thoughts leading to the Kretzmer family's decision to leave Nazi Germany, their stay in England, and their arrival in the United States.

Anne Kalen Krich was born in a Jewish family in Kuikavka, Ukraine, in 1895. She later immigrated to the United States in 1912. This collection contains a typescript of a memoir entitled Stories from the Shtetl, focusing on village life, family relationships, socio-religious customs including arranged marriages, and the pogrom of 1905. It also includes biographical information about Krich.

Jewish feminist and scholar, Anne Lapidus Lerner was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1942. She holds two B.A. degrees (from Radcliffe College and Hebrew College) and two M.A. degrees (from Harvard University and Hebrew College). In 1969 Lerner was appointed to the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. During her 30-year tenure there, she created JTS's combined social work program with Columbia University, founded the Jewish women's studies program, and directed the Jewish Feminist Research Group. In 1993 she became the first female vice chancellor of JTS. Her study, Who Hast Not Made Me a Man: The Movement for Equal Rights for Women in American Jewry, published in 1977, remains a classic of Jewish feminist history. This collection includes correspondence, speeches, donor files, and course material.

Eva Steiner Moseley was the daughter of Isabella (Zetlin) Steiner, a Russian Jewish dressmaker who migrated from Russia to Vienna, Austria, with her family in 1905 and to the United States in 1939. Steiner ran a successful dressmaking business, first in Vienna and then in New York City. This collection contains a transcript of an oral history interview with Eva Steiner Moseley by Wendy Gamber at the Schlesinger Library on June 21, 1989. Moseley discusses learning to sew from her mother, Isabella Steiner, and Steiner's family background, her training as a dressmaker, her business and customers in the United States and the social and economic aspects of her profession.

Maud Nathan was a New York society woman and social reformer, president of the New York Consumers' League from 1897 to 1917, vice-president of the National Consumers' League, a suffrage worker, and delegate to international congresses for peace, suffrage, working women, and social betterment. She came from a long line of Spanish-Portuguese Jews who made New York their home for eight generations. She was a relative of Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, Emma Lazarus, and Robert Nathan, and was married to Frederick Nathan, who organized the International Men's League for Woman Suffrage. This collection consists of scrapbooks containing mainly clippings about Nathan's activities. Also included are reports of speeches as well as reviews and correspondence concerning her book The Story of an Epoch-Making Movement.

Labor organizer, union official, and socialist, Newman was a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania. Having worked in a factory when she was very young, she was the first woman organizer for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, Director of Health Education at its Union Health Center, and an active member of the National and New York Women's Trade Union League. After 1924 she lived with her partner, Frieda S. Miller; together they raised a daughter, Elisabeth. Series I of the Papers of Pauline Newman contains her personal papers including two oral histories with information about her childhood and family, and Series III of the Papers of Pauline Newman document her work with the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.

One of the first Jewish women federal judges in the United States, Anne Freeling Schlezinger was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and graduated from Northeastern University Law School. She moved to Washington, D.C., in 1933 to work for the Labor and Justice departments before joining the National Labor Relations Board in 1937, where she eventually served as administrative law judge. She was married to lawyer Julius Schlezinger. They had a son, Ira. An edited selection from her diaries was published in 2011 as Pulling It All Together. This collection includes clippings about Schlezinger, decisions by Schlezinger, photographs, and bound diaries detailing her professional and personal life, 1931-1978.

Eileen Siedman was a budget and policy analyst and project director for a variety of organizations and government agencies. This collection consists of a memoir by Siedmen, Grandma's a Bureaucrat, in which Siedman recounts growing up in Chicago in her Jewish immigrant family, political and community involvement in Los Angeles, and her career as an administrator. It also contains her personal and political philosophies.

Frances Siegel, labor activist, graduated from Radcliffe College in 1931. Her major interests and activities lay in the labor movement and in peace and social justice organizations. She was volunteer secretary for the Labor Research Association, a Communist sympathizer, and frequent contributor to the Daily Worker (now The People's Weekly.) This collection contains relevant material from Siegel's work with B'nai B'rith, correspondence with Jewish folksinger and ethnomusicologist Ruth Rubin, and Jewish religious materials.

Clinical social worker, feminist psychotherapist, and writer, Rachel Josefowitz Siegel was born in 1924 in Berlin, Germany, to Lithuanian Jewish parents. Raised in Switzerland, she emigrated to the United States in 1939 and was awarded a bachelors degree from Simmons College in 1944. She became a community volunteer for the Ithaca, New York, chapter of Hadassah and a board member for a number of local social service agencies. In 1973 she returned to school, earning a masters degree from the Syracuse University School of Social Work. Siegel was in private practice as a psychotherapist for many years, and conducted group sessions, interviews, and workshops on women's issues, especially aging, Jewish culture, and sexuality. This collection includes biographical information, personal and professional correspondence, conference material, and audiotapes and transcripts of group sessions and interviews with older women conducted by Siegel for a book that was never completed.

Faith Soloway was born in 1964 and Joey Soloway was born in 1965 in Chicago, Illinois. Faith Soloway graduated from Indiana University and has worked in the fields of comedy, folk music, and musical theater. Joey Soloway worked in film and television production, then began writing for television shows, eventually writing and producing their own films and television series. In 2014, Joey Soloway created the Amazon Studios series Transparent, about a Jewish family in Los Angeles who discover their father is a transgender woman. Loosely based on their own experience, Joey and Faith Soloway wrote episodes for the 5 season show. This collection documents Joey and Faith Soloway's creative work as comedians, writers, and playwrights, and contains scripts, song lyrics, posters, drafts, television production files, photographs, awards, and audiovisual materials. Their work on Transparent is heavily documented.

Henrietta Schaar Szold was a Zionist leader, secretary of the Jewish Publication Society of America, founder of a night school for Russian immigrants in Baltimore in 1899, Secretary of the Federation of American Zionists, and founder and first president of Hadassah. Having settled in Palestine in 1933, she became the director of the Youth Aliyah, the youth immigration movement from Germany to Palestine. This collection consists of transcriptions and photocopies of selections of Szold's correspondence, diaries, articles and speeches from the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. These copies were produced for Irving Fineman, author of Woman of Valor: The Life of Henrietta Szold (1961). The papers relate primarily to Szold's Zionist activities: Hadassah, the Zionist Organization of America and Youth Aliyah in Palestine. The collection also contains biographical material and photographs.

This collection contains the diary of twelve-year-old Ruth Teischman, which records her thoughts about her family, being Jewish, and menstruation.

This collection contains transcripts of a broadcast of the program Voice of America about the Jewish Foundation for Education of Women and its retraining program for Soviet women emigrants. It features interviews by Iraida Vandellos with Gitel Avrutin, an accountant, and Inna Bekker, a dentist.