The Library collects annual reports, proceedings, and journals issued by many gender-based organizations. These publications provide primary resources from which to research a variety of topics, including abolition, temperance, the environment, church work, and consumer safety. Within the General Collections you can find more than fifty years of the report of the New York-based American Female Guardian Society and Home for the Friendless, but only fourteen issues of the annual report of Boston's Needlewoman's Friend Society.

You can track women's expanding roles in originally male-run groups such as the National Academy of Sciences and the American Historical Association, as well as in the more egalitarian National Spiritualist Association of Churches. For this last group, the Library holds carbon copy typescripts of the proceedings of the annual meetings, with many statements by women (1894-1983, incomplete, BX9798.S7 A15).

Membership and officer lists, budgets, reproductions of photographs, association activities, subject matter of papers presented at annual meetings, and sex of the presenters are all potential data for historical research. As with so many of these sources, the absence of women, especially women of color, in many of these volumes informs us of women's place in the organization, and perhaps in the society of the day.