Mildred Levine Albert was an International fashion consultant, educator, lecturer, columnist, producer of fashion shows, and radio/TV personality, Albert founded the Academie Moderne, a modeling and finishing school in Boston, Mass., in 1936. She was also co-director of the Hart Model Agency, presented lectures and television and radio interviews on fashion, and produced and coordinated fashion shows in Boston and nationally.

A Boston interior decorator, Baldwin earned a nationwide reputation for tapestry needlework design. From 1913 to 1919 she designed and decorated booths for Boston suffrage bazaars.

Dorothy Benedict attended Elmira College and worked for a time selling computers. In the late 1980s she and her husband, president of a graphics design firm in Needham, Mass., bought Windy Hamlet Farm in West Brookfield, Massachusetts. By 1996 she was one of four Massachusetts producers of goat's milk cheese, milking over 100 goats and producing cheese that was distributed throughout New England.

Under the auspices of the Schlesinger Library, the Black Women Oral History Project interviewed 72 African-American women between 1976 and 1981. The project sought a cross section of women who had made significant contributions to American society in the first half of the twentieth century. Some interviewees had professional careers in business, including: The sisters Elizabeth Cardozo Barker, Margaret Cardozo Holmes, and Catherine Cardozo Lewis, who founded Cordozo Hairstylists in Washington, D.C. together; Ardie Halyard, bank executive and co-organizer of Columbia Savings and Loan Association; and Arline Yarbrough, who at one time owned her own business for mail advertising and public stenography. Audio recordings, transcripts, and biographical information can be accessed online from the Black Women Oral History Project guide.

Antique dealer and appraiser and one of the first women auctioneers in Massachusetts, E. Lucille Blackwood (also known as E. Lucille Saltzberg) owned Blackwood and Company, founded the North Shore Antiques Association, and ran a shop on Burnham's Corner in Essex, Massachusetts. Blackwood lectured all over the Greater Boston area and gave one of the region's first courses on antiques at North Shore Community College.

Realtor Carlson was the first woman to be elected president of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board (1977) and one of the founders of a real estate firm in Natick, Mass. In 1978 she was one of the leaders of a drive to cap spending by state and local governments; the Committee for Guaranteed Property Tax Relief garnered 1.1 million votes in a nonbinding referendum. In 1982 she served as president of the Massachusetts Association of Realtors and was on the board of directors of the National Association of Realtors.

Lillian Greneker was a sculptor, inventor, and writer. In 1937 Lillian Greneker began making mannequins with moveable parts to replace the immoveable plaster statues then in use. Made out of papier-mâché, the mannequins were manufactured by the business she founded, the Greneker Corporation in Pleasantville, New York, and were sold to department stores all over the world. Another invention was FNG-R-TIP, thimbles with various attachments that could be used to paint, write, crochet, etc. She also invented and manufactured forms for sealing gasoline tanks for Navy warplanes.

In the late 1970s Moonyean Grosch (born Margaret Grosch) started a new bookstore on a few shelves in the back of the Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona, but by 1980, she had garnered enough business to open her own store and established Womansplace Bookstore in Phoenix, Arizona. The store catered to the feminist and LGBT communities selling bumper stickers, pins, posters, t-shirts, jewelry, greeting cards, music, feminist newspapers, and literature. The bookstore also co-sponsored a number of feminist events and served as an informal meeting place for feminist and LGBT groups.

In 1954 Cecila Hubbard opened The Botolph Group, a non-profit center and gallery for contemporary religious art, located on Newbury Street in Boston. Hubbard wrote and lectured about religious art, with many of her articles appearing in the Catholic newspaper The Pilot. In the early 1960s, Hubbard and artist Rita DeLisi set up Project, Inc., an experimental art school in Cambridge, to foster visual education. In 1971, Hubbard closed the Botolph Group and opened an antiques business and small art gallery in Cambridge.

In December 1974, H. Patricia Hynes was a co-founder, with Gill (Gillian) Gane, of Bread & Roses: The Women's Restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The only feminist restaurant in the Boston area at the time, in addition, the restaurant was part of a nexus of nearby feminist institutions, including the Feminist Health Center, New Words Bookstore, and the Women's Credit Union, providing a meeting space for many women's groups, and offering a forum for discussion of political issues that sometimes divided feminists during that period. It also sponsored women's softball teams, contributed meals to a local women's shelter, and regularly contributed small grants to other groups.

Darlene Jeter is the president of Jet-A-Way, a recycling and waste disposal company based in Boston. Founded in 1969 by her and her husband Eddie, Darlene Jeter began her work for the company as a bookkeeper and office manager. After her husband's death in 1991, she became president and expanded the company's range of services and clientele, and by 1996 the company was one of the largest minority-owned businesses in the city.

Helen Victoria Rubin Erdberg was a successful musician who worked under the persona Eliena Kazanova the gypsy violinist. In 1932 she sailed to Europe, where she assembled an all-male "gypsy" orchestra and traveled widely as "Kazanova et ses Tziganes." In addition to conducting the orchestra and performing as the soloist, Kazanova handled all the business arrangements, recruited musicians, and sewed her own costumes.

In the late 1970s, Boomer Kennedy founded a watchband business that was successful for a time, but by the early 1980s she began training as an auto mechanic in New Hampshire and at ITT Technical School in Chelsea, Massachusetts, where she was one of three women in a class of 500. In 1984 she opened Chicago Auto, which she ran in Allston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, until the late 1990s.

In 1971 Joanne Henderson Pratt, a physical chemist, along with James Pratt and two others founded the Allied Professionals Educational Consulting Services (APECS), a not-for-profit interdisciplinary research and consulting group in Dallas, Texas. In 1980 Pratt founded Joanne H. Pratt Associates, a company that conducted research and helped public and private organizations implement telework. A major project of her company included the first survey of teleworkers using micro-computers at home.

Martha Ann (nee Rossing) Robert and her husband Lucien owned and operated several French restaurants for over sixty years in Boston, Massachusetts: Maître Jacques, Maître Jacques, and Maison Robert.

In 1933, Ada Worthington founded Cape Cod Fish Net Industries, a firm that by 1938 employed more than 40 people. She owned and operated women's boutiques in Hyannis and Truro, Massachusetts; New York City; Sausalito, California; and Miami, Florida. In New York her fashions sold in 21 stores; she and her fishnet products, which included dresses, scarves, dolls, curtains, etc., were featured in several fashion magazines.

In the 1930s, Caterer Gertrude (Hornbach) Wright built a catering business called Mrs. Wright's Catering Service. She also taught cooking in her home and published several slim volumes of her favorite recipes. There is a two-page typed biographical account of Wright's life by her granddaughter, Becky Sue Epstein, written circa 2014.

Ruth Handler was a businesswoman and creator of Barbie. She married Elliot Handler in 1938 and together they formed two companies: Elliot Handler Plastics and Elzac. In 1945, they incorporated Mattel Inc., they toy company that sold doll furniture, musical toys, and a variety of burp guns, western pistols, and model rifles. In 1959, Ruth Handler created Barbie after noticing her daughter liked playing with paper cutout dolls of teenagers and career woman. She created Ken in 1961. Ruth Handler became president of Mattel, Inc., which by the end of the 1960s was a dominant toy company. Ruth served many national business organizations. The Handlers were forced out of the company in 1975 and in 1978 Ruth Handler was indicted for mail fraud, false reporting, and conspiracy.

In 1965, Stuart founded Martha Stuart Communications as an independent production company. In 1968, Stuart began to produce a show titled Are You Listening, which introduced videotape programs featuring in her words "people who are endlessly talked about and rarely listened to." With Are You Listening, Stuart brought together groups of people who had a particular experience in common, and encouraged them to speak openly and candidly with each other in order to exchange their perspectives and experiences. Are you Listening aired in 42 countries and won the National Cable Television Association's Award for Public Affairs in 1974.

A public policy and public affairs consulting firm, Bass and Howes, Inc., was founded by political consultants Marie Bass and Joanne Howes in Washington, D.C., in 1986. As the former national campaign director for ERAmerica and a lobbyist for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Marie Bass and Joanne Howes brought together over 30 years of experience to form Bass and Howes, Inc. While it operated largely in a male-dominated field, Bass and Howes came to be centrally involved in most of the key women's policy issues of the 1980s and 1990s, including reproductive rights, women's health, family and medical leave, domestic violence, and women in politics.

Good Vibrations, the second woman-owned store focusing on sex products in the United States, opened its first store in San Francisco in 1977. Founder Joani Blank (1937-2016) began Down There Press in 1975 to publish sex-positive and feminist books for women about sex; the success of these books led her to opening a store that would focus on education and products for women's sexual pleasure. Good Vibrations added a mail-order function in 1985, and employed Carol Queen as the staff sexologist, to focus on answering women's questions about sex and advise on continuing sexual education offerings. In 1992, Blank sold the company to its employees, and it operated as a worker-owned cooperative until 2006. In 1995, Good Vibrations began selling products online. The collection documents the operations of Good Vibrations and associated businesses (Open Enterprises Cooperative, Inc., Down There Press, and Sexpositive Productions) primarily from the 1990s to the early 2000s. In addition to business records, the collection also contains product catalogs, sales literature, and marketing, branding, outreach, and community engagement.

Helaine Victoria Press (HVP) was founded in Los Angeles in 1973 by Jocelyn Cohen and Nancy Poore. An artist and printer, Cohen moved to rural Indiana where she and Poore ran HVP, researching, printing, and distributing postcards on the history of women. Although HVP ceased publishing in 1990, its work is carried on at the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York, where vistors can visit the Suffrage Press Print Shop and create a hand-crafted publication.

The Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration began in March 1937, as the nine-month Training Course in Personnel Administration administered by the Radcliffe Graduate School and Radcliffe College's Appointment Bureau. By 1951, with enrollment declining and the program's finances suffering from mounting deficits, the program became jointly administered by Radcliffe College and the Harvard Business School. In 1959 the faculty voted to admit qualified graduates to the second year of the Harvard MBA program. The Harvard-Radcliffe program was discontinued in 1963 when women were admitted to the full program at Harvard Business School. Fifty-seven women who graduated from the program between 1942 and 1963 were interviewed for the project.

BizNet, a service of the United States Chamber of Commerce, produced the series "Living Legends," which profiles successful businesspeople. The series was shown on "Nation's Business Today" and aired on ESPN. The videotapes consist of three televised interviews with: Liz Claiborne and her partner Art Ortenberg of Liz Claiborne, Inc.; Olive Beech of Beech Aircraft; and Deborah Szekely, founder of Fitness Resorts/Inter-American Foundation.

The company was founded in 1873 by the children of Lydia Estes Pinkham (1819-1883) to sell the vegetable compound that she had been giving away as a cure mainly for female maladies. The company eventually had operations in Mexico and Canada as well as the U.S., and its trademark was registered in Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and East Asia. In 1968 the company was sold to Cooper Laboratories of Connecticut (later of California).

The National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs (NANBPWC) was conceived in 1934 by Emma Odessa Young, a New York realtor and member of the New York Club of Business and Professional Women and In 1936 Ollie Chinn Porter was elected as first president. The goal of the organization was to promote and protect the interests of black professional women, direct interests toward united action for improved social and civic conditions, encourage the formation of subsidiary clubs, and create opportunities for black women in business and the professions. Today, the organization continues to provide support to black business women and the African American community at large. Collection includes histories; programs; an audit report; photographs; and sheet music for the official club song, Ode to Women, of the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs and its New York affiliate.

Founded in 1974 by optician Mary Lowry and graduate student Gilda Bruckman, New Words was the country's oldest, continuously-run women's bookstore until it reinvented itself as the non-profit Center for New Words in 2002. During its first years in operation, New Words carried approximately 500 titles written only by women. It would grow to carry 8,000 titles, written by or for women, that were rotated three to four times a year. With the expansion of women's writing and publishing, New Words played a key role in making written material by and about women available to readers locally, nationally, and internationally, while it also served as informal women’s community center and host to author readings and other events. Related material can be found in the Additional Records of New Words.

Originally started as Pomegranate Productions in Watertown, Massachusetts 1976, Persephone Press was a women-owned independent publishing company specializing in lesbian and feminist literature. Its founding members were Pat McGloin, Gloria Z. Greenfield, and Marianne Rubenstein. The Press published fourteen books, mostly focused on works with a Jewish lesbian-feminist perspective, before the company was sold to Beacon Press in 1983.

In 1992 Norma J. Wikler (1942-2002) and Ruth Dixon-Mueller left academe to move to Costa Rica where they bought a coffee farm and set about the business of raising and exporting certified organically grown pineapples. Formerly on the faculties of the University of California in Santa Cruz and Davis, respectively, Wikler and Dixon-Mueller met while graduate students in sociology. Both feminists, their research interests ranged from gender bias in the courts to women's employment in developing countries. At mid-life, unencumbered by marriages or children, they chose to undertake a new adventure which in time involved growing coffee and bananas as well as pineapples, setting up a doll-making business, and running an ecology club for children. They grew, sold, and exported organic pineapples under the name Piña Perfecta until 2001.

The brainchild of Maria Rolfe, the Women's Economic Round Table (WERT) was formed in 1978 as an educational and networking forum in the fields of economics, finance, and business. Round table discussions, open to the public, were held every other month and highlighted national and international policy makers. Although both men and women served as panelists, only women were featured as moderators and questioners at the programs. Program topics included business journalism, fashion marketing and trends, micro-finance, investment strategies, national and international economic news and forecasts, and the effects of economic policies.

A spin-off of Homebased Businesswomen North, Women Entrepreneurs Homebased was formed in 1983 as a support network for women in the greater Boston area. Open to all women who own and operate a business from home, WEH provided a forum in which women could discuss their concerns and get advice. The group met monthly, its members representing varying stages of development, from start-up planning to mature organizations.