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Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The Woman's Bible. Draft manuscript, ch. 2, p. 1 (Genesis 2. 21-25). Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers (container 3). Manuscript Division. LC-MS-41210-3.

Although most often identified as a suffragist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) participated in a variety of reform initiatives during her lifetime. She actively supported dress reform and women's health issues, greater educational and financial opportunities for women, more liberal divorce laws, and stronger women's property laws. Even more controversial were Stanton's views on religion and on the Church's role in limiting women's progress, ideas that culminated in 1895 with her publication of The Woman's Bible, shown here in draft form. Assisted by a committee of academic and church women, Stanton reproduced sections of biblical text followed by feminist commentary. Although The Woman's Bible was never accepted as a major work of biblical scholarship, it was a best-seller, much to the dismay of many suffragists. Younger members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association felt that the book jeopardized the group's ability to gain support for a suffrage amendment, and they formally denounced the publication, despite Susan B. Anthony's pleas not to embarrass their former president publicly.

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Julia Bracken Wendt. Drawing of the National Women's Trade Union League seal, ca. 1908-9. National Women's Trade Union League Records (oversize cabinet 2, drawer 1). Manuscript Division. LC-MS-34363-1.

The National Women's Trade Union League, founded in 1903 to improve women's working conditions through protective legislation and to secure their right to organize and bargain collectively, differed from other social reform organizations in that its members included both working women and their middle-class allies. Within a few short years of its modest beginnings, the league began to exert considerable political influence and acquired the visual representations of officialdom, including a newly patented seal. At an executive board meeting in March 1909 and again six months later at the league's national convention, the organization's secretary reported that the new seal, drawn by Chicago sculptor Julia Bracken Wendt (1871-1942), had "brought about most happy results." The seal was added to the national office's letterhead, became "increasingly popular with all the Local leagues on all their publications," was fashioned into a pin, and--most satisfying of all--was reproduced and framed at Samuel Gompers's request to hang in his presidential office at the headquarters of the American Federation of Labor in Washington, D.C.

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Mary Church Terrell. "A Colored Woman in a White World." Draft manuscript. Mary Church Terrell Papers (container 36). Manuscript Division. LC-MS-42549-3.

A graduate of Oberlin College and a Washington, D.C., educator and community activist, Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) devoted her entire life to speaking out against racial injustice and women's inequality. As the first African American woman to serve on the District of Columbia School Board and as cofounder of the National Association of Colored Women, Terrell encountered and overcame numerous obstacles during her lifetime. In her 1919 diary (held in private hands), she wrote of her intention to pen an autobiography in which she would "be courageous and tell everything," but the resulting 1940 publication, A Colored Woman in a White World, reflected the tendency of most public figures to be more circumspect in published form than in private correspondence and diaries. Nevertheless, the raw emotion of losing three children within her first five years of marriage is very much evident in this draft page from Terrell's book. Difficult pregnancies, death from childbirth, and the loss of young children were facts of life for many American women, but such afflictions were even more prevalent among the poor and disadvantaged. As Terrell suggests in this manuscript, she believed that her babies might have survived had she and her infant children received better medical care than was available in Washington's segregated hospital system. (Diary quoted from Dorothy Sterling's biographical essay on Terrell in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green [Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980], 680.)

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Clara Barton. War lecture, ca. 1866. Clara Barton Papers (container 152). Manuscript Division. LC-MS-11973-12.

Twenty years before founding the American Red Cross, for which she became famous worldwide, Clara Barton (1821-1912) came to the aid of Union soldiers fighting in the American Civil War. At first, War Department regulations and nineteenth-century female stereotypes limited her involvement, but before the war's end, she "broke the shackles and went to the field," nursing hundreds of wounded and dying soldiers at Cedar Mountain, Second Bull Run, Antietam, and elsewhere. Although by no means the only woman to engage in such work, Barton became one of the most famous because of the postwar lectures she delivered to raise money for her efforts to identify dead and missing soldiers, especially those who perished at Andersonville prison. As this page from one of her lectures illustrates, in the days before laser printers and word processors with multiple font sizes, orators typically enlarged their handwriting to increase legibility of their remarks, which were often read in dimly lit settings.

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"The Complete Dainty Maid Outfit." Advertisement, n.d. Margaret Sanger Papers (container 252). Manuscript Division. LC-MS-38919-8.

Margaret Higgins Sanger (1879-1966), a public health nurse, was arrested in October 1916 after opening the first American birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York, in violation of state law prohibiting the distribution of contraceptive information. A leader in both the national and international birth control movements, Sanger assembled a collection of personal papers and organizational records documenting her long struggle for women's reproductive rights. Like many of her contemporaries, she retained all kinds of printed matter accumulated during her career, including pamphlets like this one relating to women's gynecological health and hygiene.

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Newspaper clipping, ca. January 1914. Kate Waller Barrett Papers (container 4). Manuscript Division. LC-MS-11882-4.

Kate Waller Barrett (1858-1925), physician and leader in the National Florence Crittenton Mission for unwed mothers, was among the delegation of women reformers who successfully lobbied President Woodrow Wilson in January 1914 to postpone enacting a law that would dismantle the capital city's notorious red-light district until arrangements could be made to assist and rehabilitate the many prostitutes who would be displaced from the triangular area that stretched below Pennsylvania Avenue two blocks from the White House to the edge of Capitol Hill. Wilson was sympathetic to the reformers and later supplied Barrett with a letter of support for the Crittenton Mission's work to be used in the organization's fund-raising campaigns. Scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, like this one from the Barrett Papers, are often found in collections of personal papers. They provide access to articles not easily located in unindexed newspapers and provide clues about other sources to consult, in this case, the papers of Woodrow Wilson, which contain scattered letters from Barrett and a case file on the 1914 Kenyon Act to Enjoin and Abate Houses of Lewdness, Assignation, and Prostitution (S. 234).

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Elizabeth Foote Washington. Journal, 1779-1796, spring 1789 entry. Washington Family Papers (container 2). Manuscript Division. LC-MS-56408-3.

Supplementing the Manuscript Division's twenty-three presidential collections are numerous other papers of presidential family members, many of which contain diaries and letters written by women. Included in the papers of the Washington family is this slim volume of sporadic journal entries written by Elizabeth (Betsy) Foote Washington from November 1779, just before her marriage to her cousin Lund Washington, to December 1796, a few months after the death of her husband, her "dear partner and companion." Lund Washington was George Washington's distant cousin, who lived at Mount Vernon and managed the future president's estate from 1765 to 1785, at which time Lund and Betsy moved to their own newly built home south of Alexandria. Betsy intended her journal to be a record for her daughters of how to conduct a household, and on several occasions she discussed her relationship with her servants, whom she obviously felt took advantage of her and her unwillingness to scold or whip them, as noted in this spring 1789 entry. Betsy's daughters would never read their mother's instructions, as both girls died in infancy, leaving Betsy to fret in her last entry about what would become of her journal and to worry that her "female servants will take every manuscript Book they can lay their hands on, & many of my other religious Books--tho' it is my intention, if I am in my senses when on my death bed, [that] I should have a friend with me--to warn them of my servants."

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James Henry Hammond. Plantation manual, 1857-58. James Henry Hammond Papers (container 43). Manuscript Division. LC-MS-24695-1.

A slave owner, Senator James Henry Hammond (1807-1864) of South Carolina compiled a detailed manual of instructions for the operation of his plantation, covering such diverse topics as crops, allowances, hogs, children, the overseer, and on the pages shown here, the old, the pregnant, and nursing mothers. Undoubtedly with an eye toward protecting and controlling his property, Hammond carefully outlined the number of months women slaves could nurse their babies, the length of time they could spend each day with their infants, the amount of work they were expected to perform, and even the body temperature they should maintain before nursing. The volume was compiled in 1857-58, around the same time that Hammond made his celebrated March 4, 1858, speech in the United States Senate arguing that "In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. . . . It constitutes the very mudsill of society." He went on to utter the oft-repeated words, "You dare not make war on cotton--no power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king."

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Witches petition, ca. 1692. John Davis Batchelder Autograph Collection (vol. 11, item 1740). Manuscript Division. LC-MS-12021-A7 (color slide).

People were executed for witchcraft throughout the colonies during the seventeenth century, but especially in Massachusetts. Many of the accused were women, prompting some recent historians to suggest that charges of witchcraft were a way of controlling women who threatened the existing economic and social order. In 1692 the famous Salem, Massachusetts, witchcraft trials took place, and that summer hundreds of people in the colony were arrested. Shown here is an appeal from ten women "besides thre or foure men" who were confined without trial in the Ipswich jail for many months. The petitioners--some "fettered with irons," some pregnant, and all "weake and infirme"--request that they be released on "bayle" to stand trial the following spring so that they do not "perish with cold" during the winter months.

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National Consumers' League. Report of Conference on Minimum Wage Decision of the Supreme Court, April 20,1923. Cover with cartoon by Rollin Kirby, which the NCL reproduced courtesy of the New York World. League of Women Voters Records (container I:25). Manuscript Division. LC-MS-29660-2.

At the same time that women were campaigning for the vote, they were also lobbying for social welfare legislation, including protective laws establishing minimum wages and restricting the number of hours women could be forced to work. On April 9, 1923, the Supreme Court ruled in Adkins v. Children's Hospital that such minimum wage laws for women were unconstitutional because they interfered with the liberty of contract guaranteed by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Two weeks after that decision, which according to cartoonist Rollin Kirby guaranteed women the constitutional right to starve, the National Consumers' League (NCL) convened a meeting of groups supporting minimum wage legislation to consider next steps. The report of that meeting may be found not in the NCL records held by the Manuscript Division but in the records of an allied organization, the League of Women Voters, which had joined the NCL and other groups three years earlier to form a lobbying organization known as the Women's Joint Congressional Committee. Locating manuscript materials for a research project often involves expanding your search beyond the most obvious sources to include the papers of individuals and organizations that may have had an association with events and activities that are the focus of your research.

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Antonia Ford Willard. Lace cap and collar. Willard Family Papers (container I:172). Manuscript Division. LC-MS-45757-6.

When division archivists sort, arrange, and describe a manuscript collection, they occasionally discover locks of hair, articles of clothing, jewelry, pressed flowers, pieces of wedding cake, wallets, badges, pins, or other three-dimensional artifacts tucked in among the papers. Generally these items are not retained within the Manuscript Division, although notable exceptions to this policy abound, including this delicately crafted lace cap and collar, purportedly made by Antonia Ford Willard (1838-1871) while in prison on charges of spying for the Confederate army. Willard, who later married her captor, Union Major Joseph Clapp Willard, wrote a poem about these items, which began with the verse "This collar my Mamma must wear, And she must wear alone, I've made it in my prison cell, Don't think me quite a drone."

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E. Carra[nce]. Watercolor drawing in souvenir autograph album. Mary Curry Desha Breckinridge file, Breckinridge Family Papers (container 845). Manuscript Division. LC-MS-13698-4.

Mary Curry Desha Breckinridge (d. 1918) was one of more than eighteen thousand Red Cross nurses who served with the Army and Navy Nurse Corps during World War I. Affiliated with a Chicago hospital unit assigned to France, Breckinridge earned the respect of her colleagues and the gratitude of the soldiers whom she nursed. Before fatigue and poor health forced Breckinridge to leave France, she assembled in this souvenir autograph album various poems, sketches, notes of appreciation, and remembrances, including some written by her patients.

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Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, Third Platoon, Company 1, Fort Des Moines, Iowa. Photographer unknown, ca. August-September 1942. Oveta Culp Hobby Papers (container 14). Manuscript Division. LC-MS-26146-1.

On May 14, 1942, Congress passed legislation establishing the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), and just two months later the first 440 recruits reported to Fort Des Moines, Iowa, for basic training, among them approximately forty African American women. The War Department and WAAC director Oveta Culp Hobby (1905-1995) had assured Congress that Negro WAAC officers and auxiliaries would constitute at least 10 percent of the corps, but aggressive recruitment at black colleges and the assistance of influential reformer and educator Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) were needed to attract enough qualified applicants to meet this quota and to dispel black women's fears of discrimination within the segregated armed services. The black press and civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, critical of the appointment of Hobby, a white southerner, carefully monitored the situation at Fort Des Moines and attempted to use the training facility as a test case to challenge the army's segregation policies. Some of the first African American women to be trained at Fort Des Moines, the women of the Third Platoon, Company 1, shown here with their commanding officer Capt. Frank Stillman, were in all likelihood part of either the first or second classes to graduate, respectively, on August 29 and September 11, 1942.

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Passport, 1921. Papers of Janet Flanner and Solita Solano (container 18). Manuscript Division. LC-MS-47084-3.

With this passport in hand in 1921, Janet Flanner (1892-1978) left her Greenwich Village literary life behind and embarked on what was to become a fifty-year career as one of the country's most influential foreign correspondents. Recently divorced and traveling with writer Solita Solano (1881-1975), with whom she would maintain a longtime intimate relationship, Flanner visited mainland Greece, the British Isles, and Italy before settling in France, where in 1925 she became the Paris correspondent for Harold Wallace Ross's recently launched magazine The New Yorker. Through her witty and informative "Letter from Paris" columns, written under the pseudonym Genêt, Flanner kept her American audience informed of the latest cultural and political happenings in France and throughout Europe.

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Vinnie Ream. Photographer unknown. Biographical File. Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USZ62-10284.

While helping to support her family as a sixteen-year-old Post Office Department clerk, Vinnie Ream (1847-1914) decided to change course and pursue a sculpting career under the tutelage of Washington, D.C., artist Clark Mills, whose studio in the basement of the U.S. Capitol attracted a steady string of senators and representatives. Within a very short time, the ambitious and charming Ream had begun to cultivate Mills's clientele, sculpting busts of several congressmen and gaining others as lifelong champions who later helped her win two important and controversial congressional commissions--the marble statue of Abraham Lincoln in the U.S. Capitol, which she began shortly after the president's assassination when she was only nineteen, and the bronze of Admiral David Farragut dedicated in 1881 in Washington's Farragut Square. Her supporters also intervened on her behalf to convince President Lincoln to allow her to sculpt this bust of him, on which she worked for five months while he conducted other business in his White House office.