Methods of solicitation vary. King says the staff uses information from scholars, reads obituaries, writes letters and calls on people. Often, collections come in 20 or 30 years after the initial contact has been made.
An air of cool gentility seems to prevail in the library. Carpeting, large, airy rooms, and nineteenth-century portraits of women signal how far one is from Lamont.
Despite the tea-party atmosphere, though, the library takes itself very seriously as a women's institution. The emphasis of the collection, as befits its origins, is still very much on feminism and specialized in the suffrage movement, professional women, and social welfare. The library also tries to keep its magazine collection comprehensive, with periodicals ranging from the nineteenth-century Godey's Lady's Book, with recipes and fashions to today's Black Belt Woman.
King says the library is trying to improve its collection of minority materials. One of the library's current projects involves interviewing black women for an oral history collection. Researchers have already interviewed over 70 women.
The focus of the library will probably change as the history of women is incorporated into general history, King remarks. Social history will become more important to the Schlesinger. "We're not all that different from other social history libraries," she observes. "They've just been neglecting the women's part in social history" and the Schlesinger tries to compensate for it.
The Schlesinger also has its lighter side. One of the library's most enjoyable sections is the etiquette and cook book collection. The library does not buy any of these books--all are donations. Julia Child, for example, gives to the Schlesinger many of the books she receives as gifts, and will probably bequeath her personal collection. Barbara Solomon, King's predecessor as director of the library, persuaded Widener to donate to Schlesinger its sundry etiquette books. Some useful bits of information contained in the older books include handling servants and curing a husband's baldness.
One of the etiquette book authors, Joseph P. Lyman, was very clear in his sexual attitudes in his Philosophy of Housekeeping, from 1867:
The fate of man is sterner (than that of women). He, with superior strength and superior courage, breasts nature in her ruggedness, and wrings from her silent bosom, with the sweat of his brow the raw material...by which the long contest with death is made possible.
The Schlesinger goes beyond mere prose in its quest for a complete women's collection. A group of suffrage posters hang in the light, uncrowded reading room. One, which indicates that even suffragettes were class conscious, shows a neatly dressed young woman listening to a large, dirty, drunken man in a worker's cloth cap tell her, "Wot do you wimmin want the vote for? You ain't fit for it!" A large banner of the "Harvard League for Women's Suffrage" is prominently displayed nearby.
King's office itself is part of the non-literary side of the collection. A bust of Longfellow by a black woman sculptor graces her bookcase, and a stained glass window by Sarah Lyman Whitman, the first woman stained glass designer, is behindKing's desk.
Most of the documents are stored in a special basement room which can be reached only by elevator. The room is kept between 62 and 65 degrees Farenheit and a constant 50 per cent humidity to protect the documents from disintegration.
The largest collection in the documents room is that of the Lydia Pinkham Medicine Company, a nineteenth century New England pharmaceutical firm, founded by a woman, whose successful cure-all elixir may have consisted largely of alcohol. The papers of Sarah Perkins Gilman, after whom the current Radcliffe lecture series is named, are nearby. She was the first woman to write about economic discrimination, King says. To eliminate such discrimination, she advocated kitchenless homes and the subcontracting of all cooking and other kitchen work.
Students who work at the Schlesinger all say the library is unusually relaxed and friendly. The library is open to anyone who has a reason to use it, King says, although half the actual users have Harvard affiliations.
King feels the Library would be an excellent resource for undergraduates should the recent agitation for a women's studies program be realized. She realizes the irony of Harvard's lack of a women's studies curriculum when it has one of the world's best women's collection. even though many undergraduates may not know it.