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.

A new searchable database will rectify this, by identifying the women and children who are represented in 90% of our collections. It will identify the number of relevant collections and the content pertaining to women and gender.

The Women in History database will be completed for library use in the fall of 2008, and will be online on our web site in 2009. The few descriptions present here were selected before the database was designed. They represent about 2100 collections in the Manuscripts Division that pertain in some way to women's history.