Herstory

The Herstory Collection comprises full texts of journals, newspapers, and newsletters tracing the evolution of women's rights movements in the United States and abroad from 1956 to 1974. Compiled by the Women's History Library from materials donated by the organizations that published them, the collection includes documents from the National Organization of Women (NOW), Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), Women Strike for Peace (WSP), and many other groups.

Among the longest-running periodicals in the collection is The Ladder, the journal of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first organization in the United States specifically dedicated to lesbian civil and political rights. Issues include those from October 1956 to August 1971—nearly a complete run. The newsletter Skirting the Capitol, published by women's rights pioneer Marian Ash, is also present in its complete run, with issues from 1967 to 1974.

Featured here are the newsletters of many local and regional chapters of the National Organization for Women, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Portland, Oregon, and many larger and smaller cities in between. In addition, a vast array of other lesser-known organizations are represented by publications such as Give a Sister a Lift, published by the Planted Breast Collective of Santa Cruz, California, and On Our Way, a newsletter of the Waterbury Area Women's Center in Connecticut.

Several newsletters are devoted to efforts to legalize abortion. Among these are the newsletters of the Women's Ad-Hoc Abortion Coalition, the Association to Repeal Abortion Laws, and the Indiana Abortion Coalition. These texts date from 1969 to 1971 and provide unique insight into the activism leading to the 1973 Supreme Court decision in the case of Roe v. Wade.

The collection includes a selection of international newsletters and journals, among them several issues of Czechoslovak Woman, the journal of the Czechoslovak Women's Council and Enough, the journal of Bristol Women's Liberation in Bristol, England. German, Canadian, and Australian publications can be found here as well.

Researchers interested the evolution of women's rights in the late twentieth century will find this collection indispensable for its primary source materials on a wide range topics, from equal pay and reproductive rights to the role of women in the peace movement.