Project Curator Women in Politics Collections - Bancroft Library

The Bancroft Library is hiring a Curator for its Women in Politics collections to steward, develop, and interpret its holdings of manuscripts, archives, and other materials documenting the history of women in politics in the United States. With the guidance of the Bancroft Director, the Curator will develop a collections strategy that identifies and scopes strategic priorities for Bancroft’s collections related to women in politics from the 19th century onward, conduct research into the library’s existing holdings to identify collection strengths, gaps, and areas for growth, and build relationships with donors, political organizations, cultural institutions, and other key stakeholders.

Collaborating with colleagues in Bancroft Technical Services and Public Services, the curator will support making existing collections accessible and usable, partner with instructors for teaching, engage in scholarly outreach, and participate in research services activities. The curator will also coordinate with the Oral History Center and curatorial colleagues to ensure cohesive stewardship of collections, and collaborate with partners across the UC Berkeley Library system and campus to foster engagement with the collections.

The Bancroft Library holds extensive collections documenting the history of women in American politics, with particular strength in California and the western United States. Spanning the mid‑nineteenth century to the present, the holdings include personal papers, organizational records, campaign materials, and feminist press publications covering suffrage, women's entry into elected and appointed office, party politics, community organizing, and the intersections of women's political work with civil rights, labor reform, environmental protection, peace, and reproductive rights.

Collections are especially rich for the period from the early twentieth‑century suffrage campaigns through the feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

Notable archival holdings include the papers of Senator Barbara Boxer, the Marjorie H.

E. Benedict papers on Republican Party organizing, the Vera Smith Schultz papers on local office holding in Marin County, and the papers of NOW California State Coordinator Sandra Farha, along with materials documenting suffrage activist Selina Solomons, Senate candidate Anne Henrietta Martin, the League of Women Voters of Berkeley, Albany, and Emeryville, and the Berkeley Women’s Studies Movement Archive.

These holdings are complemented by the Library’s Oral History Center, which holds oral histories of Bay Area female leaders, including suffrage activists, early feminists, political fundraisers, organizers, and elected officials. The Center remains committed to expanding this body of work, offering rich opportunities for collaboration.

• Work collaboratively with curatorial colleagues, Oral History Center staff, and partners across the UC Berkeley Library system to build and steward collections of lasting importance, relevance, and interconnectivity, identifying historic gaps and strategic opportunities across the library’s holdings that document women in politics.
• Appraise and select materials for acquisition through donation or purchase across manuscripts, archives, visual materials, digital media, and all formats of print materials.
• Keep abreast of evolving legal and ethical considerations for provenance, intellectual property rights, privacy, and respectful stewardship of cultural heritage materials.
• Apply resource‑sensitive collecting practices through the understanding and use of Total Cost of Stewardship tools and frameworks.

• Foster collaborative relationships with communities and individuals whose histories are documented in the collections, including activists, elected officials, political organizations, and social and civil rights movements and organizations.
• Partner with Bancroft Library leadership, the Friends of The Bancroft Library, and UC Berkeley Library Development Office to build and nurture philanthropic support.

• Collaborate…