Babson studied art, art history, and archaeology at Mount Holyoke College and the University of Illinois, Urbana. She worked in the arts for a short time before her marriage and, after her daughter entered kindergarten, she resumed her artistic studies and work. In the mid-1970s, she was invited to write a biography of sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein by the Sylvia Epstein Press. The finished book, The Epsteins: A Family Album was published in 1984. Prompted by her difficulty in finding a publisher for that book, Babson founded the Winstead Press. Her books published through that press included The Search for the Indian, and children's books The Nest on the Porch, Babson's Bestiary, and others. She also wrote an unpublished autobiography, A Journey to Myself. The collection includes diaries, correspondence, autobiographical writings, material related to the Winstead Press, and other materials regarding her artwork and family.

Bancroft was an author and intelligence officer for the Office of Strategic Services. She studied at Smith College and was twice married, once with children. She worked for Allen Dulles in the Office of Strategic Services in Switzerland, and was, for a time, his lover. She moved back to the United States in 1953. She wrote for the Swiss press, was a translator, book reviewer, and author of two novels, Upside Down in the Magnolia Tree and The Inseparables, and a memoir, Autobiography of a Spy. The collection contains her journals, speeches, and writings, both published and unpublished, among other materials, including extensive correspondence.

Writer and translator, Helen Frances Mollica Barolini was born in Syracuse, New York, has a B.A. from Syracuse and a M.L.S. from Columbia, and attended a number of universities in Europe. She married Antonio Barolini, Italian author and correspondent, had three daughters, and lived in Italy in the late 1960s. She has published a novel, two volumes of poetry, and an anthology of writings by Italian American women, as well as essays, reviews, and fiction in many periodicals. The collection contains correspondence between Barolini and various writers, as well as her family. There are also published writings.

The Beecher-Stowes were a prominent New England family noted for its contributions to the fields of education, religion, humanitarianism, and literature. Materials related to Harriet Beecher Stowe, notable author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, make up the bulk of the collection, including personal and professional correspondence containing letters from publishers. More material related to Harriet Beecher Stowe is available in the Additional Papers of the Beecher-Stowe Family, as well as a number of collections featuring letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

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. Several interviewees were writers and authors, including Margaret Walker Alexander, writer, lecturer, poet, and professor of English at Jackson State University, Dorothy West, a Harlem Renaissance author, and Deborah Wolfe, educator, minister, community activist, and writer. Additional information, including transcripts, biographies, and audio of interviews is freely digitally available in the Black Woman Oral History Project research guide.

The Boston Women's Health Book Collective began in 1969 when a small group of women gathered after a workshop on women and their bodies at a Boston-area female liberation conference to talk about some crucial health issues and to confront a medical establishment viewed as paternalistic and condescending. Perhaps best known for their pioneering handbook Our Bodies, Ourselves, published first in 1971 and again with subsequent editions and international adaptations, the Collective helped to create worldwide networks of women involved in health education and advocacy. They also produced Ourselves and Our Children (1978), Changing Bodies, Changing Lives, A Book for Teens on Sex and Relationships (1980), and Ourselves, Growing Older, Women Aging with Knowledge and Power (1987 and 1994), among others. There is related material in the Audiotape Collection of the BWHBC, and the Additional Records of the BWHBC.

Bromley was a journalist and writer. She worked as a journalist in New York City and wrote free-lance for several magazines and newspapers. She covered issues such as marriage and divorce, birth control, sexual stereotyping, women and work, and women and the legal system, among other topics. She published four books: Birth Control, Its Use and Misuse (with Florence H. Britten), Youth and Sex, Catholics and Birth Control, and Washington and Vietnam. The collection consists of photographs, correspondence, published articles by and about Bromley, background materials for her articles, as well as her book Washington and Vietnam.

Author and editor, Burns worked at a number of publishers in New York City. She is also the author of The Awkward Embrace: The Creative Artist and the Institution in America, as well as the memoirist and editor of The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, and wrote and/or edited a variety of other works. The collection consists of her commonplace books containing journal entries, correspondence, photographs, clippings, and other documents.

After a childhood relationship with Harriet Taylor Upton, a suffragist who sent Butler stories throught her childhood, Francelia Butler went on to earn a doctorate in 17th century English literature from the University of West Virginia. She championed the study of children's literature during her tenure at the University of Connecticut, and wrote The Lucky Piece: An Autobiographical Novel, and Skipping Around the World: The Ritual Nature of Folk Rhymes. She helped found the Modern Language Association's Division on Children's Literature, The Children's Literature Foundation, and a journal called Children's Literature. The collection contains letters from Upton to Butler, articles by and about Butler, biographical photographs, and a teaching module entitiled Children's Literature, by Butler.

Author and educator, Ella Lyman Cabot taught ethics and applied psychology at Boston private schools and directed the Sunday school at Unitarian King's Chapel. She published seven books on ethics and childhood education and privately printed a three-volume biography of her parents. The collection includes correspondence, journals, and account books, as well as manuscripts, drafts and notes for lectures, articles, photos, and books.

Davis is a scholar, author, and black feminist philosopher. She rose to national attention in 1969 after being removed from her teaching position at the University of California, Los Angeles, for her membership in the Communist Party. She was charged in 1970 as an accomplice to conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder, and her arrest sparked an international campaign for her release. She was acquitted and continued to be involved in the Communist Party of the United States, and continued to advocate for prisoners' rights, lecturing on social injustice, social movements, and the intersections of race, gender, and class. Her books include an autobiography, Women, Race, and Class, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, and Abolition Democracy. The collection includes drafts of her writings, as well as her research files, among a vast variety of other materials.

Author and foreign correspondent Frances Parsons Davis Cohen was the author of My Shadow in the Sun, an autobiographical account of her experiences as a journalist in France and Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Her second book, A Fearful Innocence, was an attempt to reconcile her experience of a utopian community in West Newbury, Massachusetts, with the brutality of Fascism that she had witnessed in Europe. She was married to I. Bernard Cohen, professor of the history of science at Harvard University. The collection contains typescript and manuscript drafts of her published and unpublished books, notes, and research material, as well as correspondence, financial records, other writings by Davis, and photographs.

Emily Driscoll was a West Virginia manuscript dealer. This collection contains letters and papers of 17 United States women writers, including Fanny Barrow, Florence Earle Coates, Rachel Crothers, and Gertrude Wolff.

Dworkin was an author, critic, lesbian, and radical feminist. She was arrested for protesting the Vietnam War and later made headlines, publicizing her burtal treatment at the hands of the staff. She published Woman Hating (1974), and Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (1976). Her 1981 book, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, argued that "male power is the raison d'être of pornography; the degradation of the female is the means of achieving this power." She worked with lawer Catharine MacKinnon to draft a controversial civil rights ordinance defining pornography as sex discrimination, which was later overrruled. She wrote other analyses of sexual politics, including Right-wing Women (1983), Intercourse (1987), Letters from a War Zone (1988), and Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation (2000). She also wrote short stories and novels, and contributed to numerous periodicals and anthologies. There is related material in the Audiotape Collection of Andrea Dworkin and the Videotape Collection of Andrea Dworkin.

Edgeworth, novelist, was born in England, the daughter of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his first wife, Anna Maria Elers. After attending several English boarding schools, she settled in Edgeworthstown, Ireland, with her father and his family. She was the first of the "local Irish" novelists; her first book was published in 1800. Besides novels, Edgeworth wrote children's stories. She died in Edgeworthstown on May 21, 1849. Collection consists of a bound volume containing three of her stories for children and two obituaries. Also included is David P. Hall's account (handwritten, 1866) of how he obtained the volume.

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher was an author and food writer. Fisher published her first book, Serve It Forth, in 1937, and a second, Consider the Oyster, in 1941. As a free-lance writer in Hollywood and later New York, she published cookbooks, novels, travel books, and an autobiography. She wrote a column for the New Yorker, "Gastronomy Recalled," 1968-1969, and published essays and short stories in House Beautiful, Saturday Review, and other publications.

Women's historian and author, Eleanor Flexner was the author of American Playwrights, 1918-1938, Century of Struggle, and Mary Wollstonecraft: a Biography. She served as consultant to Notable American Women, 1607-1950, for which she wrote a dozen biographies.

A socialist and deist, Gilman was an independent thinker, author, and lecturer who was an intellectual leader of the woman's movement from the later 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. She is perhaps most well known for her short story The Yellow Wallpaper. 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 is a poet, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter. She was born in Los Angeles, California and her work highlights her eco-feminism as well as addressing many contemporary issues, including climate change, war, colonialism, the body, democracy, and terrorism. In addition to her writing career, she has worked as an editor and teacher, lecturing widely in the United States and abroad. The collection documents her writing and creative projects, her relationships with other literary and artistic feminist figures of the 20th century, and her activism. It contains correspondence, drafts of multiple manuscripts, publicity materials, notes, and research, among other materials.

Author and illustrator, Halkett published several books of rhymes for children and wrote lyrics for songs and carols. The collection consists of photographs, manuscripts of her published works, drawings, reviews and musical scores.

Feminist film critic and author, Molly Haskell studied at Sweet Briar College and the Sorbonne in Paris before moving to New York City in the early 1960s. She wrote theater and movie reviews, as well as a column, "Hers," for the New York Times. She published From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies and published in in 1974 to much attention. She went on to write many other books on a variety of topics both related to film and her personal life. She has served as a visiting lecturer and as an adjunct or associate professor at Bennington, Barnard, and Sarah Lawrence Colleges, as well as Columbia University. The collection includes professional correspondence, reviews and other material related to her books, speeches, and lecture materials, among others.

Alison June Owings was raised in East Orange and Chatham, New Jersey, and Strafford, Pennsylvania. She received a BA in journalism from the American University in Washington, DC, and worked for several television news stations, including ABC in Washington, DC, WRC in Washington, WNBC in New York, and CBS TV. She is the author of four books, The Wander Woman’s Phrasebook: How to Meet or Avoid People in Three Romance Languages (1987), Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich (1993), Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray (2002), and Indian Voices: Listening to Native Americans (2011). This collection includes interview recordings and transcripts, correspondence with waitresses, drafts, and other materials produced in the creation of the book Hey, Waitress!.

Howe was a monologuist and author who studied acting with Georges Vitray in France and performed to critical acclaim in the United States and London. She wrote several novels and a family history. The collection includes the writings of Howe and her mother, Fanny Quincy Howe, as well as extensive family correspondence, diaries, and drafts of both published and unpublished novels and short stories, a play, and Howe's unpublished autobiography.

Julia Ward Howe was an author and social reformer. Her four daughters, Julia Romana Howe Anagnos, Florence Marion Howe Hall, Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards, and Maud Howe Elliott, were also authors. The bulk of the papers of the Julia Ward Howe family consist of correspondence, speeches, and writings of Julia Ward Howe and her daughters, Julia Romana Howe Anagnos, Florence Marion Howe Hall, Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards, and Maud Howe Elliott, including a manuscript draft of Julia Howe's memoirs.

Mead was a physician and historian of women in medicine. She founded the Evening Dispensary for Working Women and Girls of Baltimore City and was president of the American Medical Women's Association, as well as an organizer of the Medical Women's International Association. She published two works on women in medicine. The collection consists of the manuscript and photographs for History of women in Medicine, Volume 2: Medical Women in the Eastern Hemisphere, along with a short biography of Hurd-Mead.

Johnston was born in South Carolina and was educated at South Carolina State College, Atlanta University, and both Radcliffe College and Harvard University. While at Atlanta University, she studied under W.E.B. DuBois. She went on to teach English and sociology at schools and colleges in South Carolina and Florida. She also published two books about African American religion. The collection contains her poems, essays on racial discrimination, and an autobiography. Writings contain later comments by Johnston regarding the circumstances in which they were written, and how some were circulated as anti-segregation documents.

Lee was a Radcliffe graduate and American Red Cross Secretary who served during World War I with the American Expeditionary Forces in France, outside Bordeaux before transferring to several other American military groups in Paris as the war continued. After the War, she returned to Radcliffe for her A.M. before moving to New York City. She worked at the New York Evening Post for three years as the only woman reporter. She then spent two years writing a book about her experiences during the War. She completed the book in 1927, originally titled The Farce. The book was rejected by numerous publishers until she changed the title to It's a Great War! and won a best war novel competition. The book was published the following year. The collection includes correspondence, biographical and financial material, clippings and articles, and book-related files, among other materials.

London was an author born in Boston, Massachusetts and educated at Radcliffe College. She published three books: Portraits of Jews by Gilbert Stuart and Other Early American Artists, Shades of My Forefathers, a book of silhouettes of early American Jews, and Miniatures of Early American Jews. The collection contains photocopies of letters, publicity, and other materials relating to her books, as well as photocopies of various title pages and inscriptions to and from London, and other materials. Further information about London can be found in Their Exits and Their Entrances: A Memoir of the London Family, published in 1972 by London's sister, Bessie Pouzzner. The memoir is included in the Papers of Bessie London Pouzzner.

Robin Morgan was a child model turned freelance editor and literary agent. Throughout the 1960s Morgan published poetry and contributed articles to such literary journals as The Sewanee Review and to such leftist publications as Rat, Win, and Liberation. By the late 1960s, after involvement in civil rights and peace activism, she committed herself to feminism, first becoming involved with the New York Radical Women, and later identifying as a radical feminist. She became involved with Ms. magazine, eventually as editor-in-chief and international contributing editor. She has published more than 20 books, including collections of poetry, five books of fiction, and numerous non-fiction works. She also created anthologies, including Sisterhood is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology (1984) and Sisterhood is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium (2003). The collection includes material collected and written for Sisterhood is Global, as well as feminist subject files, draft writings, and audiotapes of Morgan speaking in conferences, speeches, and interviews.

Clara Morris was an actress and author of short stories and the books Little Jim Crow, The Silent Singer, and Life on the Stage. Married to Frederick C. Harriott, also an actor, from 1874 until his death in 1914, Morris largely supported him, her mother, and others. Her life was often difficult because of ill health, temporary partial blindness, and lack of money. The collection consists of Morris's diaries, in which she discusses her career on the stage, her writings, current events, and her personal life.

Abstract painter, poet, and philosopher, I. Rice Pereira was a major figure in the art world from 1930. She worked with the WPA Federal Art Project in New York, 1935-1939; 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. The collection contains correspondence, manuscripts of her writings, and notebooks on philosophy, among other materials.

Psychologist, writer, lecturer, and feminist, Lorine Pruette taught psychology and sociology, worked as an editor, and practiced psychotherapy. She married Douglas Fryer in 1920 but kept her own name; they were divorced in 1932. Her books include G. Stanley Hall, A Biography of a Mind, Women Workers Through the Depression, and The Parent and the Happy Child. The bulk of the collection consists of drafts of fictional works, poems, and plays, mostly unpublished and seldom dated. Also included are published articles, radio scripts, correspondence, etc.

Writer and editor Rando was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and grew up in Vancouver, Washington. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968 and received a doctorate in linguistics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972. She taught at the University of Washington in Seattle before returning to Massachusetts. She was married to Robert Rando and raised three sons. Rando died of cancer in 1998. The collection consists of diaries, covering the years 1956 to 1997, published articles and books, and a memoir edited by Rando written by Susan Sebestyen, describing her life during the Holocaust and the Hungarian Revolution.

Reyher was an author, lecturer, suffragist, and traveler. She was born and raised in New York City, and was educated at Columbia University and the University of Chicago. She became involved in the woman suffrage movement in 1913. She took her first trip to South Africa as a journalist in 1924, and this trip opened her eyes to the plight of women worldwide. She traveled to Africa several more times, and after meeting Christina Sibiya, the first wife of Solomon ka Dinuzulu, King of the Zulus, she was inspired to write her first book, Zulu Woman. She went on to write children's books My Mother Is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World and The Fon and His Hundred Wives, as well as contributing articles to numerous papers and magazines, and lecturing widely. Her papers document her work as a lecturer and teacher and her suffragist work, and the collection includes drafts of both published and unpublished books and articles, among other materials.

Biographer, essayist, and professor of English at Wesleyan University, Phyllis Rose attended Radcliffe College and earned her M.A. from Yale and her Ph.D. from Harvard University. She married Mark A. Rose in 1965, they had one son Edward and were subsequently divorced. She was the author of Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (1978), Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1984), and The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time (1997), among others. She wrote for a number of publications, including The New York Times Book Review and Civilization.The collection includes personal and professional correspondence, diaries and notebooks, divorce documents, and an unpublished draft of The Intemperate Zone, A Diary, among others materials.

Siegel was a clinical social worker, feminist psychotherapist, and writer. She was born in Berlin, Germany, to Lithuanian Jewish Parents, and raised in Switzerland. She was educated at Simmons College in 1944. She received her masters degree from the Syracuse University School of Social Work, and was in private practice as a psychotherapist for many years. She was the co-author of Women Changing Therapy: New Assessments, Values, and Strategies in Feminist Therapy, Jewish Women in Therapy: Seen but Not Heard, and Jewish Mothers Tell Their Stories: Acts of Love and Courage. The collection includes biographical information, personal and profession correspondence, conference material, and material pertaining to group sessions and interviews with older women conducted by Siegel for a book that was never completed.

Born to Babtist missionaries to Japan, Stebbins graduated from Fredonia Normal School in 1904 and taught school in New York State until her marriage to Howard Leslie Stebins in 1910. She did not begin writing until the 1920s, having been previously preoccupied with her domestic work. She went on to publish eight novels, including three works written with her son, Richard Poate Stebbins. The collection includes personal and professional correspondence, including contracts and royalty statements, drafts of both published and unpublished writings, research materials, and other documents related to her writing career.

Van Ess was a missionary for the Reformed Church in America and traveled to the Middle East, where she founded a school for Arab girls in Basrah, Iraq in 1912. She traveled extensively and published two books, Fatima and Her Sisters and Pioneers in the Arab World. The collection includes correspondence, manuscript and typescript drafts of articles, speeches, and books, as well as reviews and correspondence with publishers, journals, notes, and photos.

This collection has been digitized. Visit the finding aid for the Dorothy West collection (Call#: MC 676) for access to the digitized content.
Dorothy West was an African American writer born in Boston, Massachusetts. She began writing very young, and her short story "The Typewriter" won second prize in 1926 contest in the journal Opportunity. She then moved to New York City, where she became part of the Harlem Renaissance, publishing stories in a variety of publications. She was the editor and publisher of two African American literary journals, and eventually moved to Martha's Vineyard, where she wrote a weekly column for the Vineyard Gazette. Her first novel, The Living is Easy, was published in 1948, and her second, The Wedding, was published in 1995, along with a volume of her collected short stories. The collection contains drafts, manuscripts, published stories and articles, and other materials that document her writing career.