This series contains material documenting the broad outlines of Steinem's life. It consists of eight subseries: Writings about Steinem; Interviews; Education; Personal records; Birthday celebrations and tributes; Awards, honorary degrees and gifts; Memorabilia; and Family. The series contains material dating back to the 1940s, but, except for the experiences she recounts in some of the interview transcripts and clippings, it includes little from her childhood. Most of the material describes her life during and after college and traces her evolution from a poor Toledo teenager to a successful New York writer to an influential and internationally-known feminist.

Writings about Steinem consists primarily of magazine and newspaper articles documenting Steinem's role as a public figure and influential activist. The articles compiled in this subseries report on Steinem's activities from the 1950s to the present and record her views on a variety of issues and events. While these materials provide an overview of Steinem's long career, researchers should be aware that additional clippings pertaining to particular events in Steinem's life can be found elsewhere throughout the collection, e.g., for articles and reviews related to Steinem's books, see SERIES IV. WRITINGS. For clippings regarding particular speaking appearances, researchers may wish to consult the folders devoted to individual events in SERIES III. SPEECHES AND APPEARANCES.

The Education subseries includes material documenting Steinem's early school years in Toledo, Ohio and Washington, D.C. as well as her experience at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the two subsequent years she spent in India as a Chester Bowles Fellow. The earliest years of Steinem's general correspondence, found in SERIES II. CORRESPONDENCE, also contain letters pertaining to her travels in India. Finally, a folder of materials devoted to Steinem's activities importing Indian goods to the U.S. is housed below, with the financial and legal records among her Personal records.

Personal records consists of appointment books, business cards, calendars, notes, phone logs and lists of personal and professional contacts and their addresses and phone numbers. These provide a view of the vast professional and personal networks Steinem built and maintained throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. For a full view of Steinem's schedule, researchers may want to consult her appointment books in conjunction with the many itineraries gathered in SERIES III. SPEECHES AND APPEARANCES.

Financial and legal records in this subseries, including receipts, tax forms, check registers and canceled checks, and bank records provide a wealth of information about Steinem's personal and professional lives and document both her early success as a freelance writer and her growing influence as a feminist activist. Materials here are organized under the following categories: bank statements and check registers; business expenses; charitable contributions; general; household expenses; income and investment; medical expenses; personal expenses; expenses pertaining to Ruth Steinem; and taxes. Of special interest are Steinem's lists of business gifts and business entertaining, which shed light on her effort to build networks in the New York publishing world and in local and national politics. Additional insight into Steinem's financial affairs can be found in SERIES II. CORRESPONDENCE-EMILY CARD, which includes a transcript of an interview with Steinem about women and finances, in which Steinem comments on her own financial practices.

The Birthday celebrations and tributes subseries consists of greetings, notes and clippings, planning notes and memoranda, drafts of the "Birthday Book," and printed matter from Steinem's 50th birthday celebration. Also housed here are press clippings about her 60th birthday party and remarks made by John Kenneth Galbraith at that event.

Especially interesting are pledge cards to the Ms. Foundation Gloria Steinem fund in honor of the occasion.

Awards, honorary degrees, and gifts dating from 1958-98, illuminate the extent to which Steinem was recognized and revered as a public figure. The honorary degrees are arranged chronologically, as are the awards and gifts. The latter materials take a variety of forms; some are paper certificates or proclamations, some are plaques, and others are small statuettes, glass sculptures, or figurines on pedestals. For the convenience of researchers, three-dimensional objects and oversized documents are described on separate sheets that are interfiled with the paper certificates in their appropriate chronological position. The objects themselves are housed separately with other oversized materials in SERIES X. OVERSIZE, but the folders in this subseries thus represent the full extent of Steinem's awards, regardless of form.

Memorabilia consists of miscellaneous printed matter, keepsakes, patches, buttons, and many other such items, including Steinem's WWII war ration book, and a stamp from the office of Cesar Chavez. See also SERIES X. OVERSIZE.

Finally, miscellaneous material including clippings, notes, and legal documents regarding Pauline Steinem (paternal grandmother), Leo Steinem (father), Ruth Nuneviller Steinem (mother) Suzanne Patch (sister), and Robert Patch (nephew) and other relatives make up the Family subseries. There are also a small number of family photographs in SERIES VIII. PHOTOGRAPHS.

This series, the largest in Steinem's papers, comprising four sizeable subseries - General, Public response mail, Individuals, and Subjects -- is best described in the words of Mary Barton, Steinem's assistant in the mid-1980s, who wrote correspondents that "Ms. Steinem welcomes news, suggestions and words of advice from readers and friends," an apt description of the kinds of materials Steinem received. Every week, Steinem's office received book galleys with requests for blurbs or endorsements; manuscripts with requests for comment, if not introductions or forewords; manuscripts, film scripts or articles along with requests for advice or help in bringing them to fruition; requests for public appearances; letters from people she met at book signings, speeches, or other places; letters from people responding to her public appearances and writings, with either gratitude for or hostility toward her political positions, and/or general advice about her personal appearance; pleas for help and/or financial assistance; and letters from the mentally ill. Many individuals sent letters of appreciation for her words in print, on television, and in personal appearances. They also sent in newspaper articles and advertisements that outraged them, photographs of themselves, court documents when seeking her assistance in legal matters, promotional materials for businesses and service groups, cassette tapes of songs they had written and/or recorded about the feminist movement, videotapes of themselves, and so forth. This large volume of mail generally falls into two large subseries -- General correspondence and Public response mail. The other subseries contain correspondence with particular "Individuals," and a small amount of correspondence on particular Subjects.

Researchers should be aware that the lines between the General correspondence and the Public response mail are not distinct. In part, the difficulty in distinguishing between public-response mail and more "professional" and "personal" correspondence, especially and even until the mid-1980s, reflects the state of the feminist project, activists and authors working out of their homes, launching initiatives without letterhead, and so forth. Couple that with the blurring of personal and professional relationships, and the general effect Steinem had of making relative strangers feel as if they were among her close circle of friends, makes it sometimes difficult to discern focused fan-mail from chatty professional mail. As a general rule, letters specifically responding to public appearances or writings by Steinem are housed with public response mail, and all other correspondence filed as general correspondence. For example, requests for autographs from individual admirers are filed with the Public response mail, while requests for autographs from organizations planning fundraisers are filed with the General correspondence. Requests for interviews or meetings from professional journalists are filed under General correspondence, while similar requests from hopeful amateurs are filed under Public response mail. In many cases, copies of Steinem's reply, drafted either personally or by an assistant in consultation with Steinem, are attached.

Early material in the General correspondence pertains to her trip to India, and her business activities there. Her nascent career as a journalist is also documented in correspondence between Steinem and editors at various New York publications. After the founding of Ms. Magazine in 1971, much of the general correspondence pertains to the readership and business of the magazine, and, later, of the Ms. Foundation. As Steinem became a public figure, correspondence pertains to the possibility of securing Steinem for a public appearance, or requests Steinem's support for various organizations, from simple endorsement and/or advice to help with fundraising to serving on a board.

Public response mail consists of letters from Steinem's admirers and detractors, generally from men and women unknown to her, or whom she met while traveling. Television appearances generated a large volume of mail; for example, Steinem was generally flooded with letters after appearances on the popular Phil Donahue Show, and so weeks after those appearances (e.g. Spring 1978, January 1980, Fall 1983) are filled with viewer commentary. Similarly, 1977 correspondence contains many listener responses to Steinem's Spectrum commentaries; 1986 correspondence includes viewer responses to Steinem's work on the Today Show; 1984-85 correspondence contains responses to both the television movie based on "A Bunny's Tale" and an accompanying article Steinem published in T.V. Guide.

Similar material arrived after Steinem's public speaking engagements and following the publication of books and articles. An interesting group of letters in 1993, 1994 and 1995 respond to two articles by Steinem translated into Russian; subsequently, Steinem received inquiries from men and women in the former Soviet Union seeking advice on a range of topics from marriage to and adoption by U.S. citizens to how to advance the women's movement in Russia. (A book-length manuscript, written in Russian, was sent to Steinem; this is how housed in the Countries Collection of the Sophia Smith Collection).

The authors of these letters also include aspiring writers, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, as well as many others in search of professional advice. Included are the many requests for help Steinem received from women who had seen Steinem speak or read her work and thought she might be able to help with a host of personal problems, from sexual harassment in the workplace to the effects of divorce to child custody issues and so forth. It was those sorts of letters that eventually prompted Steinem to co-found the Women's Action Alliance (whose records are also held by the Sophia Smith Collection). Because Steinem and her assistants took such queries very seriously, and responded to them in many cases as they would queries from colleagues and professionals, it is occasionally difficult to distinguish unknown readers from friends and colleagues.

Another large category of mail in this series comes from eccentric and/or mentally or emotionally disturbed correspondents. Steinem labeled this "crazy mail," alerting her staff to them in the event that the writer might become dangerous. In some cases, dozens of letters were mailed in a short period of time by a single writer and deposited to the Sophia Smith Collection unopened; in these cases, a sampling was retained and the remainder discarded.

More than 200 folders, arranged alphabetically by surname, comprise the series pertaining to "Individuals." These files in general reproduce Steinem's own, though additional files have been created for other significant correspondents identified during processing. They are distinguished from the files pertaining to individuals in SERIES VII. SUBJECTS in that they are wholly or primarily correspondence to and from the individuals, whereas the subject files are wholly or primarily materials about the individual (for political figures, see also SERIES VI. POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS). Occasionally, however, there is both a subject file and a correspondence file for an individual; researchers interested in an individual should check both series for an individual's appearances throughout this finding aid. Given the variety of assistants who aided Steinem and the difficulty in maintaining a single filing system over the years, the presence or absence of a separate correspondence file cannot be interpreted as an indicator of a correspondent's significance.

Finally, a small amount of correspondence is gathered into a small subseries by Subject. This includes letters of recommendation and correspondence pertaining to the depositing of Steinem's papers in the Sophia Smith Collection.

Steinem has often recounted her long-held fear of public speaking. The extent of this series is indicative of how well she overcame that fear. Materials here, arranged in three subseries - General, Speech texts, and Radio and television -- include correspondence and publicity materials, speech texts, research materials, and documents pertaining to her travel, such as itineraries and contracts for the continuous stream of public appearances made by Steinem before colleges and university students, political groups, professional organizations, business groups, and bookstore audiences.

Among the General materials are contracts for appearances, speech research files, and press calls. Of special interest are two folders of cards on which audience members submitted their own questions for Steinem to address during the question and answer period which generally followed her talks. The bulk of the material housed in this subseries, however, documents Steinem's public speaking appearances, largely between 1980 and 1986. They are arranged chronologically, with a general folder for each year followed by folders pertaining to individual appearances. These files may contain correspondence, itineraries, travel receipts, publicity materials, and/or clippings regarding the event.

Speech texts, far fewer in number, are filed separately and arranged chronologically. Since newspaper coverage often contains excerpts of speeches, researchers interested in the content of Steinem's talks may wish to consult both the speech texts and the files devoted to individual appearances for insight into her comments and speaking style. The larger series of clippings gathered in SERIES I. BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL, may also be of help in this regard. There are also a small number of audiotapes from Steinem's appearances in SERIES IX. AUDIOVISUAL MATERIAL.

The final subseries here pertains to Radio and television programs to which Steinem contributed. For just over seven weeks in 1977, Steinem filled in as a substitute commentator on Spectrum, CBS Radio Network's semi-weekly personal opinion series; her commentaries, as well as related correspondence and memoranda, are filed here. Steinem also contributed to two television series: In Conversation With . . and The Today Show. Materials regarding the former include correspondence with Robert Klein as well as research materials pertaining to Steinem's guests (who included, among others, Julian Bond, Coretta Scott King, Andrew Young, and Billie Jean King), and, in some cases, transcripts of Steinem's interviews, including those with Helen Gurley Brown, Phil Donahue, Betty Ford, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Sally Ride. Audiotapes pertaining to several of these interviews can be found in SERIES IX. AUDIOVISUAL MATERIAL. Materials pertaining to The Today Show include largely correspondence and story ideas.

Throughout her career, Steinem has considered herself first and foremost a writer. This series documents her development as a journalist and author from her earliest publications as a graduate of Smith College to her recent best-selling books. It is arranged in six subseries: General, Press statements, Scripts, Articles, Books, and Unpublished work.

General includes legal documents related to the publishing industry. Permissions to reprint or quote from Steinem's work are filed chronologically. This subseries also includes materials pertaining to Steinem's editorial work for Ladies Home Journal (where in 1964-65 she edited the "Metropolitan" section) and Warner Modular Communications (where in 1973 Steinem, together with Lenore Weitzman and Sheila Tobias, served on the editorial board for women's studies research).

Several folders document Steinem's 1977-78 tenure at the Woodrow Wilson Center. She received a fellowship to consider "the longterm implications of feminism." Though her fellowship did not in fact result in the book she had initially envisioned, some of the essays which later appeared in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions resulted from her work at the Center, most notably the article on female genital mutilation co-authored with Robin Morgan.

Finally, also filed here are endorsements, or "blurbs," for books, films and television shows. Endorsements, occasionally accompanied by correspondence, are filed alphabetically by the author's last name, or, where appropriate, the director or producer.

Press statements on national events issued by Steinem's office, include, for example, the "unjust plight of Office Workers Local 174;" the Marvin v. Marvin palimony decision, women's registration for the draft, and so forth. Finally, drafts of several Scripts authored by Steinem in the late 1960s and early 1970s are housed here.

The subseries containing Steinem's many Articles includes research files, texts and manuscripts. Articles are filed in alphabetical order by title (for a complete list, see the Appendix). Folders may include a manuscript, typescript, galley, published version, or some combination thereof. Materials pertaining to the television movie that was developed from the article "A Bunny's Tale" follow the material pertaining to the article, filed here. The series also contains a bound volume of Help! (August 1960-February 1962), a "picture-humor magazine designed to frequently titillate the senses and occasionally tickle the mind," for which Steinem was contributing editor. For Steinem's regular articles published in Ms. magazine, researchers are referred to the magazine's bound volumes in the Sophia Smith Collection's periodical collection.

Steinem's article research files, which follow the texts of the articles themselves, are arranged alphabetically by subject, and include transcripts of interviews with Fannie Lou Hamer, James Earl Jones, Shirley MacLaine, and John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene, among others.

The subseries pertaining to Steinem's several Books is arranged alphabetically by title, and includes The Beach Book, Marilyn, Moving Beyond Words, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, and WonderWoman. Materials include correspondence, legal papers, publicity, research files, and reviews, as well as the drafts, galleys and publications themselves.

Finally, Unpublished work includes drafts of a travel guide, "India by Air," and some short fragments of texts.

This series includes materials pertaining to several organizations either founded by Steinem or in which she was an active participant. It is divided into eight subseries: International Women's Year; the Minnetonka Corporation (a cosmetics company organized in July 1986 at the Fifth Avenue offices of Calvin Klein); Ms. magazine and its allied philanthropic arms; the National Women's Political Caucus, Voters for Choice, the Women's Action Alliance, Women USA, and the Wonder Woman Foundation. These organizations are arranged alphabetically. For other organizations in which Steinem participated or maintained an interest, see SERIES VII. SUBJECTS.

In 1972, the United Nations declared 1975 to be the International Year of the Woman. Steinem later described the 1975 conference, held in Mexico City, as "a kind of constitutional convention for women." After the conference, U.S. President Jimmy Carter convened the International Women's Year (IWY) Commission, whose task was to convene a representative conference in every state, and to elect delegates to attend the First National Women's Conference, held in Houston, Texas in November 1977. The conference drew 15,000 participants, who spent four days discussing and voting on twenty-six areas recommended by the state conferences. Records pertaining to Steinem's involvement with the IWY are scattered, but include minutes, memoranda and other material pertaining to the Houston convention and the drafting of the National Plan of Action.

This series also includes Steinem's records pertaining to the Minnetonka Corporation, a cosmetics firm on whose Board of Directors Steinem served in the late 1980s. They include correspondence and memoranda, business and financial reports, board member briefing books, and miscellaneous related material

Materials pertaining to Ms. are organized into two subseries: the publishing venture, Ms. magazine, and its philanthropic arm, the Ms. Foundation for Women. Ms. was spearheaded by Gloria Steinem and Brenda Feigen as a result of their experience with the Women's Action Alliance. Initially conceived as a newsletter to distribute information of interest to feminists, the idea evolved quickly into a national magazine. Pat Carbine, then an editor at McCall's, joined the project, and Ms. magazine was founded in 1972. Always embattled financially, in no small part due to difficulties obtaining advertisers, a plan emerged in the late 1970s to reorganize as a non-profit educational foundation that would operate under the auspices of the Ms. Foundation for Women. In 1979, the new entity was christened the Ms. Foundation for Education and Communication. Through the 1980s and to the present, the magazine has struggled financially, but has remained prominent as a voice of the contemporary feminist movement.

The records of Ms. magazine include Advertising, Circulation and distribution, Editorial, Employees, Financial and legal, and Special projects. The largest of these, not surprisingly, is Editorial, which includes both letters from readers as well as correspondence with authors, in many cases filed together with the manuscript(s) under consideration. Prominent authors include Alice Walker, Andrea Dworkin, and Florynce Kennedy. Especially illuminating are the marginal notes Ms. staff added to manuscripts; these, like the in-house memoranda circulated among staff members, reflect both the collective editorial process and the perspectives brought to the magazine by its various editors, from which the Ms. perspective was forged. In addition to the picture captured here of the changing shape of feminism as it was conceived and advanced by the magazine, its authors, and its founders, the memoranda and correspondence shed light on some of the difficulties engendered by the non-hierarchical, feminist workplace the staff sought to create.

Scholars have already noted that the magazine's business end was by and large more traditional than its editorial practice, an insight documented in the records associated with Advertising, Circulation and distribution, and Financial and legal matters. Materials here document the magazine's heroic effort to remain afloat, including the securing of advertisers willing to forego complementary copy, and donors anxious to support the magazine and/or the foundation. Marketing analyses rate Ms. readers in comparison to other women's magazines.

Philanthropy has always been closely associated with the Ms. project. Not long after the magazine was launched, the Ms. Foundation for Women was established to further the feminist cause. Steinem has described the Ms. Foundation for Women as the "grant-giving mother with two daughters who do her outreach work": the Free to Be Foundation, and the Ms. Foundation for Education and Communication. The Free to Be Foundation was formed as a supporting organization of the Ms. Foundation for Women "to develop and disseminate educational materials which challenge stereotypes, stress individuality, and eliminate barriers of prejudice and discrimination." Its first series, "Free to be . . . You and Me," was developed by board members Marlo Thomas and Letty Cottin Pogrebin. A second series, "Free to Be . . . A Family," explores the many varieties of family life. While the Ms. Foundation for Women continues to thrive, the Ms. Foundation for Education and Communication, as of 1998, was dismantled.

The National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) was founded in July 1971 in a conference of about three hundred women leaders that Newsweek magazine called "rowdy" but which, it also noted, produced a "plausible definition and a strategy for a women's political movement where none had existed before." The Caucus was launched quickly in the public mind as an important new political development thanks to extensive media reporting of its founding and subsequent activities. The early attention paid to the NWPC probably resulted from the status and celebrity of many of its founders, as well as its potential to influence the 1972 Presidential nominations and elections. After the elections concluded, the NWPC rapidly became the media's main source of information and comment about women in politics. (The NWPC Records are located at the Schlesinger Library, Harvard College).

Records of the NWPC in Steinem's papers date largely from the early to mid 1970s and include agendas, minutes, and memoranda from committees and subcommittees, as well as material pertaining to in-house business, such as political conventions and elections of NWPC officers. Of particular interest in the latter regard is a memoranda from Bella Abzug detailing what she perceived to be election fraud surrounding her 1989 defeat for the Caucus chair. For Steinem's speech nominating Irene Natividad as chair of the National Women's Political Caucus, see SERIES III. SPEECHES AND APPEARANCES--speech texts, 1985; for her address before the NWPC convention in San Antonio, Texas, 9 July 1983, see SERIES IX. AUDIOVISUAL MATERIAL-audiotapes.

Voters for Choice was founded in 1979 to combat the emerging right wing in the elections of 1980. A founding member, Steinem also sat on the Board of Directors. In 1984, Voters for Choice merged with the Friends of Family Planning. Materials include memoranda, minutes and agendas from the Board of Directors, 1979 - 86; lists of donors; campaign strategy handbooks; and research materials, including clippings, articles and reports on abortion rights and voting behavior, as well as polling data from Lou Harris and Gallup. The latter includes information regarding women's attitudes toward U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

In 1971, Steinem, along with Brenda Feigen and Catherine Samuels, co-founded the Women's Action Alliance (whose records are also held by the Sophia Smith Collection). Conceived of as an advisory service that could provide back-up support for existing women's groups, the WAA worked to coordinate resources for organizations and individuals involved in the women's movement, with a particular emphasis on the grass-roots level. The organization's original mission was "to stimulate and aid women at the local level to organize. . . specific action projects [e.g. child care, job training and placement, legislative action, political lobbying, etc.] aimed at eliminating concrete manifestations of economic and social discrimination." Steinem served as chair of the WAA's Board of Directors from 1971 to 1978, and through the 1980s assisted with fundraising projects to benefit the Alliance.

Records of the Women's Action Alliance in Gloria Steinem's papers include agendas; budgets and financial reports; minutes; memoranda; and reports pertaining to the operations of the WAA and similar material pertaining to the many programs the WAA developed between 1971 and 1986. Though the WAA persisted until 1997, Steinem's papers document only the WAA's first fifteen years. For additional information, researchers should consult the records of the WAA itself, also housed in the Sophia Smith Collection. Especially useful information regarding the inner workings of the organization is contained in a folder related to "Personnel." Two essays filed under "Institutional histories" are also interesting in this regard.

Women USA, launched in April 1979, aimed to motivate women on several levels. Responding to a "rising mood of militancy" among American women, the founders of Women USA - Bella Abzug, Yvonne Burke, Patsy T. Mink, Maggie Kuhn, Brownie Ledbetter, and Gloria Steinem -- sought to harness that energy by, for example, organizing lobbying efforts on social and economic issues and orchestrating mass letter-writing campaigns. The group also established a toll-free telephone number by which to distribute information. The comparatively small number of documents here include the group's 1979 articles of incorporation, as well as early correspondence, outreach materials, and press releases.

The Wonder Woman Foundation, funded by Warner Communications, Inc. together with D.C. Comics, Inc., was launched in September 1981, on the 40th anniversary of the appearance of the comic book heroine of the same name. The Foundation was "dedicated to advancing the principles of equality for women in American society." Unlike most foundations, which fund only projects and groups, the Wonder Woman Foundation provided financial support for individual women. The Foundation's founding executive director was Koryne Horbal. Though Steinem was among the organization's founders and early supporters, she was not a member of the Board of Directors

Relatively few materials pertaining to the Wonder Woman Foundation are found among Steinem's papers; records of the WWF are also housed at the SSC, though they are at present closed to research. Materials in Steinem's papers include correspondence, clippings, and printed material, largely pertaining to awards ceremonies.

This series contains material related to electoral politics. It is divided into two subseries: Individuals and Organizations. Both record a broad range of Steinem's involvement, from a single endorsement to her active engagement in fundraising and campaigning. Four folders, arranged alphabetically, contain correspondence pertaining to candidate endorsements; an additional series of individual files contain larger amounts of correspondence and printed material pertaining to specific campaigns.

Materials relating to political organizations in which Steinem participated or monitored include the Congressional Women's Caucus, the Women's Presidential Project, and, most notably, the Democratic National Committee. In 1969 Steinem became a member-at-large of the Democratic National Committee's Democratic Policy Council, a group of seventy-four whose responsibility it was to monitor the Nixon administration, and to create a blueprint for the next Democratic convention. There are scattered materials pertaining to both the DNC and the Policy Council, including a 1969 letter in which Steinem expresses pessimism over the Policy Council's (led by Hubert Humphrey) prospects.

This extensive series contains files, arranged alphabetically, in which Steinem kept material on subjects in which she had an interest, from Abortion to the Working Women United Institute. Also included are organizations for which Steinem served in some official capacity. Materials in this series vary widely, and include correspondence, clippings, proposals, and printed materials.

This series contains photographic images of Steinem, her family, friends, and her colleagues. Several folders contain photographs of Gloria Steinem alone, from the 1940s to the present. A handful of family photographs from Steinem's childhood are located here, as well as several folders of photographs, arranged alphabetically by subject, of friends and associates; these may or may not include Steinem. Group photos are largely arranged chronologically by decade. Groups of photographs taken at specific events, such as the rally supporting the Louisiana Sugar Cane Workers, are filed separately. There are also photographs of Steinem with fans, at book signings and other such events, scattered throughout SERIES II. CORRESPONDENCE -Public Response Mail. For other photos of Steinem, researchers may wish to consult Dori Jacobson's Women's Rights Portfolio, 1979-1986, also housed in the Sophia Smith Collection. Finally, there are several photographs housed in SERIES X. OVERSIZE MATERIAL, some of which duplicate images in SERIES VIII.

The audiovisual materials in the Steinem papers include a range of formats: Audiotapes (cassette and reel-to-reel), Computer diskettes, Record albums, and Videotapes. Audiotapes include programs of which Steinem was the subject, interviews conducted by Steinem, and music, some of which contain feminist anthems submitted by fans. Several tapes contain interviews conducted by Steinem in connection with the ABC series "In Conversation With . . .". Audiotapes are numbered continuously by format. Use copies have been made of some original audiovisual materials. Researchers interested in viewing or listening to audiovisual materials for which there is no use copy should contact the Sophia Smith Collection to discuss options.

Fans, friends, and organizations presented posters and artwork, often depicting Steinem, to her as gifts. These objects, which include an oil portrait, a pastel drawing, a hologram, and homemade plaques and pictures, are gathered together in this series along with photographs, posters, awards and citations, galleys and printed material. A Brownie beanie given to Steinem by Rita Mae Brown is among the oversize memorabilia.