A Pembroke College alumna, class of 1948, and founding board member of the Pembroke Associates, Christine Dunlap Farnham had long envisioned an archives chronicling the history of women at Pembroke College and Brown University and of women in Rhode Island. Upon her untimely death in 1984, Farnham's friends and associates honored her commitment to the Pembroke Center by helping to bring her archival project to fruition. The first stage of the project, funded by the Farnham Memorial, expanded Brown's collection of materials on Brown and Rhode Island women and organized and catalogued the wide-ranging documents on women's history already in the University Archives. Karen Lamoree’s Research Guide to the Christine Dunlap Farnham Archives (1989) marks this effort through a detailed catalogue of the contents of the Farnham Archives, as well as other documents pertaining to women in Brown’s special collections.
The Pembroke Center has long pursued the archiving of the history of Brown and Rhode Island women, who have been extraordinary agents for social change on multiple fronts, in the Christine Dunlap Farnham Archives. Housed primarily in the John Hay Library, this collection focuses on 19th- and 20th-century Brown and Rhode Island women and their organizations.
From the guide to the Christine Dunlap Farnham Archives records, circa 1973-1993, (John Hay Library Special Collections)
