LABOR HOLDINGS AT THE SCHLESINGER LIBRARY, RADCLIFFE COLLEGE.

The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America in Cambridge, Massachusetts was founded in 1943 when Radcliffe College, Cambridge, accepted the Woman's Rights Collection (WRC) . The WRC documents several woman's suffrage organizations and includes the papers of Maud Wood Park and other women active in the women rights movement. But it does not end with 1920, the year the federal suffrage amendment was ratified, and it includes the library's first labor collection, papers of Frances Perkins, U.S. Secretary of Labor, 1933-45, and the first woman in the Cabinet. Thus despite the emphasis on suffrage and women's political and legal rights, labor issues, from the beginning have been an integral part of the Schlesinger Library. At about the time the WRC arrived at Radcliffe, president Wilbur K. Jordan and Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, of the Harvard University's history department decided to make it the centerpiece of a growing research library on women, rather than a static memorial to the suffrage movement. Soon after, in December 1945, another major labor collection arrived, the papers of Leonora O'Reilly. O'Reilly's papers make up one major series in the micropublication, "The Papers of the Women's Trade Union League and Its Principal Leaders," a project sponsored by the Schlesinger Library, edited by Edward T. James, and published by Research Publications Inc. in 1981.