It closed in 1940, but the efforts made to establish a center to collect records encouraged several colleges and universities to begin develop similar archives of women's history.
By changing what documents were noteworthy, using personal records to shape public history, the Women's Archive legacy was foundational to the development of feminist theory.
In 1935, Rosika Schwimmer, a pacifist suffragist, proposed to historian Mary Ritter Beard an idea to establish an archive to preserve the records of influential women.
[1] In Schwimmer's letter to Beard, she expressed her desire to create a repository for her personal archives,[2] as well as leaders in the feminist and pacifist movements.
[7] The first meeting of the board was held in New York City on October 15, 1935,[10] and early in 1936, the archive was incorporated with Inez Haynes Irwin as chair; banker Mina Bruere, as Treasurer; and Jane Norman Smith and Phillips on the Executive committee.
Beard established the motto "No documents, no history", originally penned by French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, for the archive.
[14] Beard was convinced that it only appeared that women were passive actors throughout history because there were no records showing that they had always been involved in defining civilization.
[23] Schwimmer had first described this problem, noting that Aletta Jacobs' collection had been untouched and unavailable to researchers since it was acquired by the John Crerar Library nearly three decades prior.
[13] In 1939, a gala event was hosted in Washington, D. C. by Roosevelt and the Archives featuring some of the papers of Nellie Tayloe Ross, 14th governor of Wyoming.
The team also consulted with J. Morrice Jones and Irve Tunick from the Office of Education and others like suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt; Eleanor Flexner, a woman's historian; and Eugenie Leonard, prior dean of women at Syracuse University.
That policy brought concerns from other factions, like Miriam Y. Holden (NWP),[22] a scholar and collector, who worked for social justice with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,[40] who wanted a direct confrontation on the issue of racism.
[47][48] It not only established protocols that collecting women's archives were valuable in shaping the historical narrative, but laid the "foundations of the feminist historiographical paradigm" and more generally of other marginalized communities.