New Acquisition of Women’s Center Materials

Earlier this year, Archives & Special Collections acquired a folder of documents from the Vice Provost of Student Life on the topic of the Women’s Center at Santa Clara University.

The University of Santa Clara’s Women’s Center was founded in 1981 as an organization with the goal to inform members of SCU’s campus of the different issues affecting women. The Women’s Center offered mentor programs, provided pertinent literature through a curated selection of library books, published a quarterly newsletter, and provided a safe and comfortable space for women to meet other women on campus.

“You Are What You Say” by Robin Lakoff is an example of one of the resources that the Women’s Center provided: an article from Ms. Magazine photocopied onto yellow office paper. Click on the image to view a PDF of the full article.

In addition to providing a rich resource for those studying feminism in context with the history of SCU, the acquisition of this folder offers the opportunity for us to tell you a little bit more about how materials end up in the archives with the intent of being permanently preserved.

The first step of the life-cycle of a record is the most necessary: creation. Organizations create records in the normal course of doing business. In our example here, someone at the Women’s Center created newsletters, posters, and other helpful printed information to share with female students in pursuit of serving the mission of the Women’s Center. Once these items are no longer actively in use, the creator makes a decision to trash the materials or permanently preserve them, hopefully with us in the Archives so we can make them available to others. In our example, Dean Rosenberger transferred the folder of materials to us after storing it for some time herself. At that point, the University Archivist appraised the materials, ultimately deciding to acquire them. Deciding whether materials should be permanently preserved in the archives depends mainly on two fundamental questions: whether the records are historically valuable and whether the records are appropriate for our repository. We decided to keep this little cache of interesting stuff because it adds to similar materials we already have relating to student life at the university, and because they are germane to the research interests of students and faculty.

“What Can Students Do About Sex Discrimination?” was one of the sheets provided by the Women’s Center to Santa Clara University students to prepare them for how to deal with sex discrimination. Click to enlarge.

This “Women in the Arts” poster distributed by the Women’s Center offers information of multiple Santa Clara University events focused on women and the arts, including an event with Maya Angelou.

We invite you to contact us to make an appointment if you’d like to look at these materials in depth!