John E. Herzog collection of women's financial ephemera

This collection documents American women's involvement in business and finance over more than 170 years. The bulk of the collection consists of stock certificates, many for businesses or organizations run by women or associated with women. Women's education is covered by stock certificates for a wide range of schools, including the Female Collegiate Institute in Virginia, Albany Female Academy in New York, Brownsville Female College in Tennessee, and others. Other stock certificates highlight women's clothing and appearance, including the Co-operative Dress Association, The Reece Button Hole Machine Company, McLean & Hooper Sewing Machine Company, the Norfolk and New Brunswick Hosiery Company, and the American Beauty Culture Society. Women's health is represented by stock certificates for American Gynecology and the Vaginette Surgical Instrument Company.

The collection also shows women participating in fields typically dominated by men. A number of stock certificates show the growing range of publishers for women: The Ladies' Home Magazine Publishing Company, Woman Patriot Publishing Company, Western Woman's World Publishing Company, etc. Women are also involved in real estate, demonstrated by new companies like the American Women's Realty Corporation, the Woman's Land Syndicate, and the San Francisco Women's Building Association. Women are even founding new mining companies, like Mollie E. O'Bryan's Teutonic Consolidated Gold Mines Company in Wyoming and the Transvaal Gold Mining Company in Colorado. There are several examples of women buying stock in railroad companies, including a stock certificate for the Panama Rail Road Company issued to Harriet Beecher Stowe. There is also a circular for an oil company run by a woman, The Woman's Right Oil & Gas Co. of Okmulgee, Oklahoma.

Many items in the collection focus on the major 19th- and early 20th-century women's movements of temperance and suffrage. Numerous stock certificates and other ephemera document the temperance movement, including the Union Temperance League of Ohio, the Lincoln Temperance Association, the Women's Christian Temperance Union of Pennsylvania, and the National Women's Christian Temperance Union. Herzog has collected autograph notes and other ephemera from many of the big names in these movements, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Julia Ward Howe, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Stone Blackwell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances E. Willard, and others. He also includes engravings or photographs of many of these women.