Collections

The American Civil Liberties Union Southern Women's Rights Project (SWRP) collection is composed of the organizational files used by the SWRP while it conducted grassroots efforts in the Southern United States to campaign for women's rights. The bulk of the collection consists of administrative and subject files Betsy Brinson used during her tenure as project coordinator. Other aspects of the collection include ACLU administrative files, correspondence with Southern ACLU offices and partner organizations, and compilations of notable legislation from southern states. This collection provides insight into the ACLU-SWRP's goals during Betsy Brinson's tenure as project coordinator and documents the project's efforts in encouraging the growth of grassroots activism to improve women's rights in the South.

The Betsy Brinson collection contains materials Brinson collected related to her activism and involvement in various organizations, namely the YWCA and Richmond Peace Education Center. The Richmond Peace Education Center materials include newsletters, as well as planning documents and ephemera for the Eyes Wide Open Project. The YWCA materials mostly include pamphlets, information on a YWCA children's reading program, and news clippings. The collection also contains miscellaneous newsletters and reports produced in Virginia or regionally about women's rights and social justice, pins and buttons that are largely political in nature, and photos from the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. There are some syllabi and reading packets from Brinson's time teaching at VCU, but the collection largely reflects the organizations and work Brinson was involved with outside of VCU from 1974 to 2013.

The bulk of the collection consists of oral history interviews conducted by Betsy Brinson in 2016 and 2017 with people who volunteered and worked with affected communities in the Richmond area during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. There are seven different interviews on cassette, all about thirty to forty minutes long. The interviews are digitized with links to the files in Series 1.

The bulk of the collection consists of oral history interviews conducted by Betsy Brinson in 2016 and 2017 with people who volunteered and worked with affected communities in the Richmond area during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. There are seven different interviews on cassette, all about thirty to forty minutes long. Researchers will find content relating to major HIV/AIDS organizations in Richmond that served the community during the AIDS epidemic along with a detailed history of those organizations. These organizations include the Fan Free Clinic, Richmond AIDS Information Network, Central Virginia Aids Services and Education, along with others. Also found in the collection are interview notes, a booklet from Transformation Retreats, and a laminated newspaper clipping describing the exhibit.

The bulk of the collection consists of oral history interviews conducted by Betsy Brinson in 2016 and 2017 with people who volunteered and worked with affected communities in the Richmond area during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. There are seven different interviews on cassette, all about thirty to forty minutes long. Researchers will find content relating to major HIV/AIDS organizations in Richmond that served the community during the AIDS epidemic along with a detailed history of those organizations. These organizations include the Fan Free Clinic, Richmond AIDS Information Network, Central Virginia Aids Services and Education, along with others. Also found in the collection are interview notes, a booklet from Transformation Retreats, and a laminated newspaper clipping describing the exhibit.

The Virginia Feminist Oral History Project consists of oral history interviews that Dr. Megan Taylor Shockley conducted with women involved in second-wave feminism and related activism in Virginia during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Topics discussed in the oral histories include the interviewees' early lives and education; their experiences as feminists and activists; their work with various local, state, and national organizations; and their perspectives on feminism and the future of the movement. These oral histories document how the women interviewed understood their own progressive actions, how they formed their individual feminist perspectives on the world, how they related to other feminist women, and how they assess their work in light of the contemporary political landscape.