My first project for the Network was to help organize folders of health information stored in four-drawer file cabinets. In 1987 everything was still on paper and the drawers were overflowing! Lots of important documents from the first two decades of the women’s health movement were tucked into those folders. I sent them to the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, where the Network had begun archiving its organizational records a few years earlier. I continued sending important records to the Collection the entire time I worked at the Network. One of my last projects in 2021 was to organize 19 boxes of records, including the Network’s testimony at dozens of FDA advisory committee meetings. The photo above shows the boxes waiting to be shipped off. The finding aid for all these documents and summary of archived materials stored at the Women’s History Collection can be found here (this link will open in a new tab).

The Network produced a print newsletter from 1976 to 2022. The newsletter was often the first, and sometimes the only, place women could get independent, deeply reported information on a specific women’s health issue. We never shied away from controversy, but we always got our facts right. The entire newsletter collection is archived at the Women’s History Collection. Individual articles dating from 1993-2003 (Network News) and 2004-2021 (Women’s Health Activist) can be retrieved from ProQuest, in the GenderWatch Collection.

Archived sections of the Network’s website can be found by using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at web.archive.org.

The Network and its founders have Wikipedia pages. Former Executive Director Victoria Leonard and I have been interviewed as part of the Veteran Feminists of America Pioneer Histories Project. Long-time board chairs Adriane Fugh-Berman, Jane Zones and JoAnne Fischer are also included, as are Barbara Seaman, Alice Wolfson and Sybil Shainwald.