Journals, letters, organizational records, scrapbooks, photographs, portraits, needlework, artwork, clothing, and household tools reflect women's experiences in Ohio. Topics that are well documented include temperance, suffrage, women's rights, education, religion, war, and family relationships. The professional lives of women are represented, particularly traditionally female occupations such as nursing and teaching. Prominent Ohio women included in the online scrapbook are Susan B. Anthony, Frances Casement, Toni Morrison, Annie Oakley, Lily Martin Spencer, and first ladies Florence Kling Harding, Caroline Scott Harrison, Lucy Webb Hayes, and Ida Saxton McKinley.

Among the noteworthy items in this category are photographs of Florence Kling Harding casting her vote in 1920, the first election after the 19th Amendment extended suffrage rights to women; a photograph of a Ku Klux Klan Ladies' Auxiliary float in a parade celebrating Akron's centennial in 1925; photographs and a trophy relating to Miss America 1938, Marilyn Meseke of Marion, Ohio; and photographs of professional women athletes-tennis player Ann Grossman of Grove City and race car driver Sarah Fisher of Commercial Point.

Home and Work

In early Ohio, much of a woman's day consisted of arduous and time-consuming tasks of cleaning, cooking, laundry, and making clothing. Each of these was a far more drawn-out process than it is today. Food preparation required planting and cultivating a garden, harvesting a crop, preserving, drying, milking, cooking, and baking. Making clothes involved processing raw wool, spinning thread, weaving, dyeing, and cutting cloth, then sewing by hand.

Between 1820 and the Civil War, the growth of new industries, businesses, and professions helped to create in America a new middle class. Families in the middle and upper classes hired servants and purchased commercially-produced clothing and food, relieving some of the drudgery of pioneer life. This helped to give rise to a new ideal of womanhood and a new ideology about the home termed the "cult of domesticity." The new ideal included four characteristics any good and proper young woman should cultivate: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness.