Feminist activist Marcia Niemann recently gifted her personal archives to the Texas Woman’s University Department of Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies and Blagg-Huey Library Woman’s Collection. The Marcia Niemann Feminist Activism Collection will include court testimonies, music records, protest buttons, signs, and rare books related to the women’s movement from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Between 1978 and 1988, Niemann served as executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She was also a senior political organizer for the National Organization for Women and NARAL Pro-Choice America.
“I grew up knowing the value of records of everyday life as historical documents,” said Niemann. “I saw carefully collected files on feminist issues at one organization where I worked destroyed when a new administration arrived and didn’t think they were important, and many other files that dissipated and were lost as time went by. I talked with local history museums and women’s studies departments in the late 1980s and 1990s, and they gave me advice on what to keep and how to preserve things. I am thrilled to know that the materials will be available to other people who might be interested just in the joy of reading as well as in the historical aspects.”
Nieman notes that there are many other important but forgotten documents existing in the files and garages of her contemporaries. Such records “will be of value to researchers 100 years from now who are studying the women’s movement of my time,” Niemann said. “I am worried that we are going to lose these valuable materials, and I long for the day when libraries, museums, and scholars have raised the funds to set up more extensive feminist archives.”
The Niemann collection will be housed at Blagg-Huey Library on the university’s Denton campus. Parts of the collection will also be digitized and made available to researchers and community activists across the country.