The Manuscripts Division formally began operating in the 1920s. The Clements became widely known in the scholarly world for its Revolutionary War collections, and the emphasis of collection descriptions in early guides and National Union Catalogue listings was military, political, and masculine. Women and children were largely ignored, unless famous in their own right.

The new guide will rectify this, by identifying the women and children who are represented in most of our collections. It will describe the quantity of such material to be found, describe the women, their activities and interests, and the extent to which the particular collection is useful as a source of social and family history.

The few descriptions present here are merely a beginning of the larger project that includes hundreds of collections relating to women and gender.