Ninth annual convention of the National woman suffrage association. [Washington, D.C., 1883] Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Printed Ephemera Collection bibliographic record

The Library collects annual reports, proceedings, and journals issued by many women's organizations, as well as those to which both sexes belong. These publications show women's involvement in an enormous range of issues, among them abolition, temperance, concern for the environment, church work, and consumer safety, to name just a few. Within the General Collections you can find more than fifty years of the report of the New York-based American Female Guardian Society and Home for the Friendless (1848-1907, incomplete, HV99.N6 A4), but only fourteen issues of the annual report of Boston's Needlewoman's Friend Society (1848-69, 1894-97, incomplete, HV99.B7 N3).

You can track women's expanding roles in originally male-run groups such as the National Academy of Sciences and the American Historical Association (the records of the AHA are held in the Manuscript Division), as well as in the more egalitarian National Spiritualist Association. For this last group, the Library holds carbon copy typescripts of the proceedings of the annual meetings, with many statements by women (1894-1983, incomplete, BX9798.S7 A15).

Membership and officer lists, budgets, reproductions of photographs, association activities, subject matter of papers presented at annual meetings, and sex of the presenters are all potential data for historical research. As with so many of these sources, the absence of women, especially women of color, in many of these volumes informs us of women's place in the organization, and perhaps in the society of the day.