Sophia Smith Collection

The Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College is an internationally recognized repository of manuscripts, photographs, periodicals and other primary sources in women's history.

One of the largest recognized repositories of manuscripts, archives, photographs, periodicals and other primary sources of women's history, the collection consists of over 8,000 feet (2,400 m) of material documenting the historical experience of women in the United States and abroad from the colonial era to the present. The Sophia Smith Collection shares facilities with the Smith College Archives on the college’s campus in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Subject strengths include birth control and reproductive rights, women's rights, suffrage, the contemporary women's movement, U.S. women working abroad, the arts (especially theatre), the professions (especially journalism and social work), and middle-class family life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England. Many of these collections are rich sources of visual, as well as manuscript and printed material.

Open to the public free of charge, the collection does not circulate but is available to everyone, can be visited online, or requested as photocopies.

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. The collection was later named after the founder of Smith College, Sophia Smith, who upon her death in 1870 willed her fortune of $387,468 (approximately $7,000,000.00 in the current market) to endow Smith College.

In 1941, Smith College President Herbert Davis proposed the Friends of the Smith College Library that they take on as a special project a collection devoted to works of women writers. Smith College Archivist Margaret Storrs Grierson was appointed Executive Secretary of the Friends of the Smith College Library and Director of the Women's Collection in 1942.

According to Grierson, President Davis was "not clear in his own mind" about what he wanted. Women's rights activist, historian, and archivist Mary Ritter Beard,"rather hoped that [Smith] would be interested in carrying on the work of the recently abandoned Women's Archives [World Center for Women's Archives (WCWA)]," which she had founded in 1935. Within the first year the scope of donations, coupled with Beard's influence, mandated that the project be redefined as a "special historical collection of women's materials, recording women's interests and activities in the course of human history and across the face of the earth".

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