In 1898 Aldrich travelled to Paris and subsequently settled there. While living in Paris, she became a close friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. In 1914 she retired to Hilltop (La Creste), her cottage in Huiry, a village on the outskirts of Paris. While at La Creste she published four collections of her letters: Hilltop On the Marne (1915), On the Edge of the War Zone (1917), Peak of the Load (1918), and When Johnny Comes Marching Home (1919). She also published a novel, Told in a French Garden (1916). The collection consists of four bound volumes containing a typed transcript of Aldrich's autobiography, Confessions of a Breadwinner, which she completed in 1926. See also The Burial of a Fallen Poet (call number A/A36), an edited version of a section of Confessions of a Breadwinner; the poet is Oscar Wilde.

Helen Jackson Almy (1884-1976) was the first Chief of the Social Work Section of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. She volunteered with the Harvard Medical Unit in France.

Babson was a private in the 104th U.S. Infantry in France –from 1917 to 1918, after which he attended Harvard College. His sister Helen Hatch Babson (1889-1984) served as a housemother at Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, Kentucky. This collection consists primarily of letters to Babson from his sisters and mother when he was in the army in France during World War I. They describe daily activities and attitudes toward the war in Massachusetts and Kentucky. The collection also includes a patriotic scrapbook of clippings on life in the U.S. during the war.

A telephone operator with the Signal Corps in France during WWI, Barbour worked for AT&T before and after the war. This collection includes mementos of the Signal Corps and Barbour's article for AT&T's Bell Quarterly on women in the telephone industry and in the Signal Corps.

Borden served in France with the U.S. Army Nurse Corps during World War I. A resident of Sheffield, Pennsylvania, Borden reported for duty at Camp Dix, New Jersey, in July 1918 and worked in hospitals in Angers and Vannes between November 1918 and June 1919 before returning to the United States.

Brewer’s work in French field hospitals during World War I is documented by scrapbooks and letters to his wife, as well as by a scrapbook kept by his family friend and office nurse, Beatrice MacDonald. MacDonald was wounded during an air raid and was honored for her service by the British and French governments and received the Distinguished Service Cross. The MacDonald scrapbook has been digitized, and the scrapbook is accessible through Harvard's online viewer.

A social worker (Radcliffe College, B.A., 1914; Simmons College, School of Social Work), Burrage joined the Radcliffe Unit established by the Radcliffe Alumnae Association War Work Committee. Its members were drivers and aides to the French Red Cross from April 1919 to May 1920, during reconstruction efforts in French villages in the aftermath of World War I. Burrage was stationed with the Union des Femmes de France, Poste Dispensaire, in Vermand, Aisne.

The Cannon family papers include correspondence between Cornelia James Cannon and her husband, Walker Cannon, written while he served as a military doctor in France during World War I. The correspondence describes a family separated by war, from Walter's experiences working in a military field hospital to Cornelia and the children dealing with the effects of war at home, including rationing, planting victory gardens, the influenza epidemic, and growing antagonism toward Germans living in Cambridge.

Coe served in a number of organizations devoted to woman suffrage and to war service work during World War I. She worked with the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government, the Women Suffrage Coffee House in Groton, Mass., and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Club in Boston.

Mary (Mollie) Crawford graduated from Cornell University in 1894. After becoming a surgeon, she volunteered with the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, during World War I. This collection consists of an oral history interview about her experiences during World War I. Topics include amputation techniques, cultural differences, and her relationships with Algerian and Turkish patients and interpreters.

Curtis went to France in 1917 as a staff member of the American Fund for French Wounded. From 1918 to 1921, she worked for the American Committee for Devastated France and later became a diplomat.

Margaret Curtis went to Paris in 1916 to organize relief for French refugees as head of the investigation department of the Student Atelier Association. In July 1917 she joined the American Red Cross in Paris and served as chief of the Bureau of Refugees; from January through June 1919 she continued her relief work under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee. She was awarded the Medaille de Guerre by the French Red Cross (1919) and the Medaille de la Reconnaissance Francaise by the French government (1920) for her relief work. Her sister Harriot worked at the Center for French Wounded and the Home Service Division of Civilian Relief.

A suffragist, pacifist, artisan, and advocate of birth control and sex education, Dennett was also an active opponent of U.S. involvement in World War I. She managed a series of mass meetings of the American Union Against Militarism and was a leader of the People's Council, a radical antiwar group, and the Woman's Peace Party.

Within the Barry family collection, Ruth Harriet (Barry) Derr's materials include letters, a photograph album, and a memoir documenting her service in the Red Cross as a canteen worker in France during World War I.

Dewson was active in the woman's suffrage movement and the National Consumers' League and was head of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee. Scrapbooks kept by Dewson and her partner, Mary ("Polly") G. Porter, include a volume documenting their war work with the Red Cross in France from 1917 to 1919.

A graduate of Simmons College and the nursing school of Boston Children's Hospital (1907), Farley was one of the first to volunteer for overseas duty with the American Red Cross in 1914. She served as a nurse in Kiev and was awarded the Imperial Russian Order of St. Anne by Czar Nicholas II.

Writer Inez (Haynes) Gillmore Irwin was active in the women's suffrage movement and the first fiction editor of Max Eastman's periodical The Masses, as well as one of the original members of the feminist society Heterodoxy. Included in the collection is a diary of a trip she took abroad during World War I as a reporter for various American magazines.

Goodrich went to France to work in an American Red Cross canteen in 1917 and returned home shortly after the armistice in 1918. This collection includes Goodrich's letters to her aunt describing life in France.

Hall was superintendent both of nurses and of the Nurses Training School at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. She was also head nurse for the Harvard Unit and then the American Red Cross in France and Great Britain during World War I.

Hall chaired the New England Clothing Committee working with the Comité Franco-Américaine pour la Protection des Enfants de la Frontière during World War I. Digitized scrapbooks contain records of work by Hall's committee, bills, sample patterns, reports, pictures of children, and other items; folders contain letters from Caroline R. Hill to Hall.

After completing nurses’ training at Germantown Hospital, Hamilton travelled briefly in Spain, and in 1916 went to France, where she served as a nurse during World War I.

Harrison was a political science professor at Connecticut College for Women. During World War I she served as a director of Red Cross hospital service work in Bordeaux, France.

A paleobotanist (Radcliffe, A.B., 1911; A.M., 1912), Holden was on a research fellowship in England when World War I began. She took a Red Cross nurses’ training course, worked in hospitals in England, and in January 1916 went to Russia with the first Millicent Fawcett Medical Unit to establish hospitals for Polish refugees. Holden learned Russian and Polish and was an interpreter and courier for the unit. She contracted typhoid and died of meningitis while helping establish hospitals and working in paleobotany in Kazan.

From 1919 to 1920, Holman was head of the Radcliffe Unit in France established by the Radcliffe Alumnae Association War Work Committee to help with the reconstruction of French villages after World War I. Members of the unit were drivers and nurse's aides for the French Red Cross. Holman was stationed at Buzy.

During World War I, Johnson went to France with the American Expeditionary Forces, an experience she described in Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces (1920), co-authored with Addie D. Hunton.

A teacher and writer who was a leader in the campaign for women's suffrage, Laidlaw was Chairman of the Volunteer College Workers, New York State and City, U.S. Food Administration, during World War I. The collection includes correspondence, certificates, and printed material concerning Laidlaw’s activities during the war, as well as information concerning the status of Army and Navy nurses.

The League of Women for Community Service was an African American women's organization first established in Boston during World War I as the Soldiers' Comfort Unit.

Lee served with the American Red Cross as a secretary, eventually joining the Base Hospital Number 6 (Massachusetts General Hospital Unit) staff of the American Expeditionary Forces in France, outside Bordeaux. She transferred to the American Air Service in Paris in 1918 and in the fall of that same year joined the American YMCA as a canteen worker in the Zone of Advance at the First Air Depot at Colombey-les-Belles, near Toul. After returning home, she wrote a book about her World War I experiences. The book, completed in 1927, was initially titled The Farce. After it was rejected by numerous publishers, she eventually changed the title to It’s a Great War! and entered it in a best war novel competition.

A volunteer civic service worker in Boston, Levis was involved in social, political and religious women's organizations, Boston's Italian community, the Republican Party, and women's suffrage. During World War I she participated, with other suffragists, in the sale of Liberty Bonds and in programs for food conservation and for Americanization of Italian immigrants.

MacDonald was a lieutenant in the Montclair (New Jersey) Chapter of the Red Cross Motor Corps during World War I. This collection includes one volume devoted to her family's involvement in the war, including war-related activities in Montclair, NJ.

Pediatrician Dorothea May Moore spent 1917 and 1918 in France working as a bacteriologist and technician in an American Red Cross Hospital.

The papers of the Marshall-Spiess family span three generations of women and their families, containing correspondence written during World War I between Elva Spiess and her husband Frederick, who was serving. The collection also includes Frederick’s memoir written during the war.

Margaret Wessell Piersol, mother of Anne Murray Morgan, volunteered to go to Europe as a nurse's aide with the American Red Cross. She was stationed in France from 1917 to 1919.

Helen Shurtleff (1877-1968) and her husband Ernest Warburton Shurtleff (1862-1918), a minister, worked extensively with war refugees in France (many of whom were blind) dispensing food, supplies, and medical care.

O'Hare, an American Socialist, was imprisoned in 1917 in the Missouri State Penitentiary for her anti-war activities. This collection contains letters written to her family while O'Hare was in prison, concerning American politics, World War I, and personal and family matters.

Mary Peabody, an activist and civic volunteer, was the wife of Malcolm Peabody, an Episcopal priest who served as a chaplain in France. During his absence, Mary Peabody worked with the Women's Liberty Loan committee, which encouraged women to buy Liberty Bonds to support the troops. The collection includes several diaries by Malcolm Peabody, including those he kept during World War I.

Kathryn Reed Pierrepont worked with Anne Morgan and the American Committee for Devastated France (Comité Américain pour les Régions Dévastées de la France) as an interpreter.

Elizabeth (Lowell) Putnam, a political activist, philanthropist, and pioneer in prenatal care, chaired the Relief Department of the Special Aid Society for American Preparedness, an organization set up to help families of World War I servicemen and to prepare the country in case of natural disaster. Putnam was later appointed by General LeRoy Sweetser to serve as the Acting Adjutant General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In this capacity she founded the Women's Auxiliary of the Intelligence Bureau.

A pacifist and feminist (University of Montana, B.A., 1902), Rankin was the first congresswoman, representing Montana for the 1917-1919 and 1941-1943 terms; she also was the only member of Congress to vote against U.S. participation in both world wars.

In 1917 the Radcliffe College Alumnae Association funded a committee to sponsor post-war relief work by Radcliffe alumnae in France. This collection contains scrapbooks with photographs, correspondence and reports describing the war relief work.

Thérèse Filene Shouse helped found Boston's War Camp Community Service Entertainment Bureau, a forerunner of the United Service Organizations in the Boston area, during World War I. This collection contains a photograph album from the Bureau.

A Vermont agriculturist, Smith was member of the Woman's Land Army during World War I. This collection includes reports of the Woman's Agricultural Camp, Bedford, New York (1917) and of the Wellesley College Training Camp (1919) organized by the Woman's Land Army of America.

During World War I, Corinna Lindon Smith and her husband, Joseph Lindon Smith, worked with the Comité Franco-Américain pour la Protection des Enfants de la Frontière (Franco-American Committee for the Protection of the Children of the Frontier), which provided assistance to impoverished French children and their families. In 1920, Corinna undertook a three-week tour of France and Germany to assess the damage suffered by over 200 factories in the two countries. As a result of this expedition, she wrote Rising Above the Ruins in France, which was published in 1920.

A French social worker, Vieillot worked with the Red Cross during World War I, studied social work in Boston and New York City, and was the first Frenchwoman to receive an M.S.W. from Simmons College.

The records of the Woman’s National Farm and Garden Association, founded in 1914 to promote agricultural and horticultural interests among women throughout the country, include material about the Woman's Land Army (WLA).