Sophia Smith Collection

The collection was established by Margaret Storrs Grierson in 1942 to serve as the library's distinctive contribution to the college's mission of educating women.

Such a collection would be primarily if historical value, almost surely offering...fresh material from which to rewrite the pages if our country's history....

In the process, I have more or less quietly won the approval and support and clarification if many intelligent alumnae and non-Smith women....I am the only one on campus who knows the women's field at all, and I have met only with support from he president although I have gone slowly, perhaps a little deviously, relying on accomplished fact to argue for me....In any case, I think you will understand how I came to go ahead... if the comprehension if those whose plan it is supposed to be.

According to Grierson, "the name of Smith College's founder was not used for other purposes,... and it seemed fitting to adopt the name of the woman who had founded the college to provide women with an education equivalent (not equal) to that offered men, for the collection which was to provide a better knowledge of the accomplishment of women through the ages.... ".

The most widely used collections include those of birth control crusader Margaret Sanger; Ellen Gates Starr, co-founder with Jane Addams of the Chicago settlement, Hull House; Mary van Kleeck, social researcher and reformer; the Garrison, Hale, and Ames families; political activist Dorothy Kenyon; the papers of author and activist Gloria Steinem; and lesbian feminist and architect Phyllis Birkby.

Records of Organizations include the minutes, correspondence, reports, publications and related materials documenting the activities of more than sixty organizations focused on women's issues, like Planned Parenthood Federation of America; the National Congress of Neighborhood Women; and the National Board of the YWCA.

The Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project, founded by Arden Eversmeyer in 1999, is archived as part of the Sophia Smith Collection.