For a list of Sapphic Circle meeting dates in July & August, please click here.
Sapphic Circle is a space for lesbians to come together for thoughtful discussions on a variety of topics. We seek to build lesbian community through engaging in lesbian ideas, politics, media, and more!
As we have passed from the paper era into the digital era and now, into the cloud era, lesbian herstory is becoming more accessible than ever before. At the same time, because of assimilationism and changing politics, the value placed on lesbian herstory is changing constantly. Here's a short list of virtual and real world archives containing our herstory.
Material Archives - Lesbian Specific
Archives lesbiennes du Québec - Montreal, Quebec
Wanderground Lesbian Archives/Library - Providence, Rhode Island
Lesbian Herstory Archives - Brooklyn, New York
Bay Area Lesbian Archives - San Francisco, California
Mazer Lesbian Archives - West Hollywood, California
Material Archives - Mixed
Canadian Women's Movement Archive (CWMA), Ottawa - Ottawa, Ontario
The Arquives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives - Toronto, Ontario
Iowa Women's Archives (IWA), University of Iowa - Iowa City, Iowa
The Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliff Institute - Cambridge, Massachusetts
Sophia Smith Collection of Women's History, Smith College - Northampton, Massachusetts
Digital Archives - Mixed
Canadian Women's Movement Portal, uOttawa Library, users will be able to search the database to locate the organizations and their records which document the trajectory of feminist activism in Canada, since 1960.
Rise Up! is a digital archive of feminist activism in Canada from the 1970s to the 1990s.
JSTOR - Feminist subsection of the Independent Voices collection
Video Archives - Mixed
Feminist VHS Archive - YouTube
Radfem Archives - YouTube
Questions To Consider
- Why is lesbian herstory important to you?
- Have you ever accessed an archives of lesbian and/or women's herstory?
- How do you think you or the women you know could contribute to archiving lesbian herstory?
- Do you have any thoughts about how to balance making lesbian herstory accessible, yet private?
