Women's Action Alliance Records, 1970-1996 : Scope & Contents of the Collection

Scope and Contents of the Collection

The breadth and scope of the WAA projects are indicative of the diversity of the women's movement itself. The most successful projects include the Information and Reference Service, the Non-Sexist Childhood Development Project (NSCD), and the National Women's Agenda and Women's Centers Projects.

The WAA's main modus operandi was to identify a problem, question, or population with specific needs; formulate and distribute a questionnaire exploring the activities and needs of groups or individuals concerned with the issue in question; and summarize the results in a directory, guide, or manual. As a result, scattered throughout the records of the WAA and its many initiatives are caches of replies, reports, and data on far-ranging subjects.

A significant proportion of this material documents the activities of a large number of women's centers, projects, and services across the U.S. and abroad, from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s. By 1974 the WAA had begun to collect and preserve files tracking such activities, while the production of the "Practical Guide to the Women's Movement" and subsequent directories, organized both by geographic location and by program area, also involved the distribution and return of questionnaires in which women's centers and service organizations outlined their services, objectives, and goals. Vertical files in the reference collections of the WAA library, organized alphabetically by state and generated in connection with the "Practical Guide to the Women's Movement," preserve these profiles together with associated correspondence and literature. Another set, generated by the Women's Center Project, is housed with the records of that initiative.

The WAA's work with women's centers illustrates the organization's Byzantine nature, in that some of the WAA's initiatives were conceived by one department, launched by another, and administered by a third, with records and files shared and transferred between offices. Thus, in some cases, records pertaining to a significant issue embraced by the WAA are distributed throughout several series. For example, from the National Women's Agenda Project (SERIES II. PROJECTS) sprung the idea to create a networking service and national directory for local women's centers across the country. When the NWAP folded in 1980, the "Women's Centers Project" was created to take its place, offering networking and technical assistance programs. Eventually, the directory was compiled and printed. The organizational profiles gathered in this effort were preserved in the WAA library (SERIES III. RESOURCES-Library-Reference collections-Vertical files), while material pertaining to the actual publication, Women Helping Women: A State-by-State Directory of Services (1981) is found in SERIES III. RESOURCES-Library-Publications.

As the organization evolved and matured, projects were increasingly launched by the WAA and then handed off to largely independent staff who carried them through. For that reason, records of some WAA programs (e.g. Buddies Exploring Science Together (BEST) and the Women and AIDS project) are either represented by a very small amount of material, or not represented at all. By 1993, for example, of the WAA's fifteen paid staff people, six worked outside the organization's Lexington Avenue headquarters, in the South Bronx office of the Citizens Advice Bureau, Brooklyn's Medgar Evers College, and even Mujeres Latinos en Accion, based in Chicago, though there are no materials preserved here from the South Bronx, Brooklyn or Chicago personnel. For these reasons, the records fully document the organization's growth and development through the 1970s and 1980s, but contain comparatively little material from the 1990s. Records pertaining to the dissolution of the WAA will not be available until 2004, after they are released by the law firm that served the organization.

In as many places as possible, elements of the WAA's filing system were preserved. For example, the general subject files kept by the Executive Director's office, as well as those kept by Ruth Abram, arrived nearly intact, and each set has been left in its original order. A large series of files containing information on potential funders has also been preserved (SERIES I. ADMINISTRATION-Development and fundraising). By and large, however, the records of the various WAA projects and programs came in different levels of organization, reflecting in part the decentralized structure of the organization. In addition, the records reflect the idiosyncrasies of an ever-changing cast of project directors and administrative assistants. The present arrangement of the records, especially in the case of administrative files, reflect our effort to achieve some consistency across and between programs.