Mary Louise-Smith and Louise Noun, Des Moines, 1996.

The Louise Noun – Mary Louise Smith Iowa Women’s Archives is named for its founders, who established the archives in 1992 as a repository dedicated to collecting the history of Iowa women. The Archives fulfills its mission by collecting and making available primary sources about the historical experience of Iowa women throughout the state and beyond its borders from the nineteenth century to the present, reflecting the diversity of Iowa women across race, class, ethnicity, and gender identity.  It undertakes a robust outreach program to gather and preserve the history of groups underrepresented in archives. Some of our collection strengths include materials relating to rural and farm women, women in politics, LGBTQ individuals, African American women, Latinas, and Jewish women.

• ArchivesSpace (search archival collections)
• Iowa Women’s Archives homepage
• News from the Iowa Women's Archives
• Iowa Digital Library
• Special Collections
• University Archives

This guide brings together IWA’s archival collections documenting Iowa women’s contributions to the field of medicine and to health activism. The descriptions of each collection provide a brief summary of its contents along with a link to more in-depth description in the ArchivesSpace database.

At the Iowa Women’s Archives, we define Iowa women as those women who were born or educated in Iowa or resided here for some part of their lives. As such, the collections in this guide are international in scope, including women who spent their careers in Iowa as well as those who spent some of their lives abroad. Collections in this guide represent these women and their organizations from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 2020s. 

Personal papers are organized by profession. Medical doctors can be found under the Physicians tab and professors in nursing colleges under Educators. The organizational records are represented in the Organizations tab. Other Healthcare Practitioners includes pharmacists, a dietician, and a bacteriologist. 

Historically, nursing has been the medical field most open to women and accordingly, this section has the most entries. To accommodate this, the Nursing tab has been split into a general section along with three sub-sections: Military Nurses, Rural Nursing, and Nurse Midwives & Maternal Health. Since many collections touch on multiple areas of healthcare, the above groupings are not mutually exclusive and some collections appear within multiple tabs.

Professors of Dental Hygiene Beth Pelton and Marijo Beasler, 1994

The Iowa Women’s Archives is located on the third floor of the Main Library of the University of Iowa.

Open to Researchers: 

Tuesday-Friday, 9:00-12:00 and 1:00-4:00

Mailing Address:

Iowa Women’s Archives

100 Main Library

University of Iowa Libraries

Iowa City, Iowa  52242-1420

Campus Mail: 3094 LIB

Phone: (319) 335-5068

Email: lib-women@uiowa.edu

Guide content supports the teaching and research goals of multiple departments on campus. Content represents a non-exhaustive selection of essential resources and tools for engaging a wide range of backgrounds and viewpoints.