Mary Earhart Dillon collection, 1863-1955

Mary Earhart Dillon assembled this collection in the early 1940s in the course of writing Frances Willard: From Prayers to Politics (published under the name Mary Earhart by University of Chicago Press in 1944). Due to the difficulty of finding primary source material, Dillon contacted various women in the Midwest (especially the Chicago lawyer and suffragist, Catharine Waugh McCulloch) who had been active in temperance, woman's suffrage, and related movements and activities. These women gave Dillon books and papers they had created or accumulated during their work for these causes, and Dillon, as a member of the faculty of Northwestern University, arranged with the university library that she would deposit the materials there when she had completed her research.

When the time came, she was told that the library had no space for the collection, nor funds to process it and make it available to other researchers, and she was asked to remove it as soon as possible from the basement of the building in which her office had been. Dillon later recalled that she then offered the collection to the Newberry Library (Chicago), The New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress, and possibly also to Syracuse University, but was unable to find a taker until, in June 1948, she wrote to the Women's Archives (later the Schlesinger Library) at Radcliffe College, and received a positive and enthusiastic response. When the papers arrived at Radcliffe in August 1952, the staff immediately recognized them as at least the equal in quality and importance of the Woman's Rights Collection, which had formed the nucleus of the Women's Archives.

Dillon, assistant professor of political science at Northwestern in June 1948, that September joined the Department of Government at Queen's College in New York. She later published a biography of Wendell Willkie, and was for many years a National Consultant for the Schlesinger Library. At the time this collection was microfilmed, she was living in retirement in Memphis, Tennessee.