Donating your Collection

How are STICHWORT's collections built up?

When we founded the archives in 1983, we wanted to create a place for the feminist movement to map out its history and document its activities.

The involvement of women's and feminist groups in STICHWORT has resulted in the donations of varied material from the political, academic and activist sphere. Reviewer's copies and private donations ensure the continued growth of the archives. In addition, we always encourage feminist organizations as well as private women to make material available to other women through donation to STICHWORT.

Feminist archives are the memory of the movement

The Women's and the Lesbians' Movements have strongly influenced contemporary society. Nevertheless, they are confronted - perhaps more than any other social movement of this century - with the risk of being forgotten, distorted, passed over in silence.  Feminist and lesbian archives all over the world play an essential part in opposing the forgetting and distorting of our "herstory".

We try to create a consciousness of the fact that history - especially women's history - can only be reconstructed by its many and diverse details. Therefore, each woman's contribution is important. Every single leaflet, programme, poster, meeting minute, tape, video, manuscript etc. is an important element in realizing our own history and can become the basis for further action.

STICHWORT makes your "treasures" available to many women

We would be very pleased if you were to consider donating your collection to STICHWORT. All material we receive is indexed according to our feminist classification system and made available to our users.

Although the materials are accessible to the public, we place certain restrictions on some of them, to ensure that they are not abused. For example the minutes of group meetings can only be looked at after agreement by the team.

Donating Specifics – a Few Notes

If you would like to give us archival material such as flyers or meeting minutes from your women’s group, we depend on your help for the formal recording and content-related indexing. For a timely and matter-of-fact classification of your papers, you are the expert. The better organized and dated your material is, the better and more quickly the items can be processed and made available. Often you may not have time for this. If not, it is important that we be able to contact you in case of questions!

Your collection may contain books or archival documents which are already in STICHWORT’s holdings. If you would like, you can contact us in advance in order to sort out possible duplicates or let us know if you would like duplicates to be returned.

In the case of audio and/or visual material, a special agreement is necessary. In these cases we conclude a contract with the person(s) donating in order to prevent future unclarities. In the contract we clear up questions relating to copyright, the use and the privacy protection of the image.

If you are considering the donation of a collection to STICHWORT please  contact us for further details.