‭Lesbian Herstory Archives‬

‭

https://lesbianherstoryarchives.org/
lhaspecialcollections@gmail.com [reach LHA Special Collections team only]
info@lesbianherstoryarchives.org [reach LHA for all other inquiries]

We founded The Lesbian Herstory Archives in the 1970s when a group of women involved in the Gay Academic Union realized that Lesbian history was “disappearing as quickly as it was being made. ” Our mission is to gather and preserve records of Lesbian lives and activities so that future generations will have ready access to materials relevant to their lives. Later in 1974, a larger group of women started meeting on a regular basis to work out the deeper vision of this undertaking. We are now coming up on the 51st year of our existence.

The Lesbian Herstory Archives exists to gather, preserve and provide access to records of Lesbian lives and activities. Doing this also serves to uncover and document our herstory previously denied to us by patriarchal historians in the interests of the culture that they served. The existence of the Archives will thus enable current and future generations to analyze and reevaluate the Lesbian experience.

The existence of these Archives will enable us to formulate our living herstory and to create an archive representing a diverse range of Lesbian lives and cultures.The Archives collects material by and about all Lesbians, acknowledging changing concepts of Lesbian identities. All expressions of Lesbian identities, desires and practices are important, welcomed and included. The goal is to document the widest range of Lesbian experience from all geographic, cultural, political and economic backgrounds and historical contexts, not just the lives of the famous or the published.

We collect:
We encourage Lesbians to record their experiences and to donate to the Archives any materials that are relevant to their lives. This may include books, magazines, journals, news clippings (from established Feminist and Lesbian media), bibliographies, photos, Lesbian ephemera, T-shirts, tapes, films, diaries, oral histories, poetry and prose, biographies, autobiographies, notices of events, posters, graphic, zines, unpublished papers, organizational records, and memorabilia and references to our lives.