Papers of Irene Davall, 1971-1987

The collection contains Davall's writings, including copies of her column, The Liberated Woman (covering topics such as the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive and abortion rights, marriage, divorce, the decriminalization of prostitution, health care, and gender-based socio-economic inequality) and clippings about feminism, but very little personal material. The bulk consists of drafts and correspondence regarding a manuscript compiled by Davall and Phyllis Sanders. Biographical material and general clippings about feminism appear first, followed by Davall's writings, book proposals, drafts, correspondence, and the unpublished manuscript by Davall and Sanders. The manuscript, initially titled The Changing Role of Women, was based on a weekly radio show that Sanders hosted for several years. Sanders interviewed hundreds of women for the program; the proposed manuscript was initially based on interviews of seventy-five women, divided into thirteen subjects. As the project evolved, they limited the number of interviews to forty and changed its title to Voices of Restless Women: Speaking of Their Struggle for Change in the 1970s. The work was not published. Because it evolved, the chapter introductions written by Davall and Sanders often do not match either the chapter titles appearing on the interview transcripts or the various tables of contents. It is arranged below with the introductions to chapters appearing first (# 1.6), followed by folders containing transcripts of the interviews that Sanders conducted, arranged numerically according to chapter. During one of the manuscript's permutations, chapter titles seem to have shifted (as indicated by pencil notations); however, as these shifts are unclear, they are arranged here according to the chapter number typed in the upper right-hand corner of the page. Often Davall and Sanders included several interviews in one chapter; in the folder headings below, individual's names are listed as they were grouped by the authors, with distinct groups separated by semicolons.