The collection principally contains research files and files on other feminist organizations, as well as administrative records, including files relating to the publication of Majority Report, and files on various FOCAS activities.
Many of the Collection files contain research on a vast array of women's issues. Subject files also span a political spectrum—from radical militant feminism to mainstream advocacy. Subjects represented include discrimination against women in government, educational, military, health and business institutions, consciousness raising, abortion and reproductive rights, sexual harassment, rights of women prisoners, nurses, nuns, minorities, secretaries, housewives, lesbians, international women's emancipation, and much more. These subject files include primarily published materials, including articles, pamphlets, newsletters, newspaper clippings, legislative reports, press releases, statements about community actions, and a small amount of ephemera, along with handwritten and typewritten commentary and correspondence.
In addition to the subject files, the Collection includes a series of external organization files devoted to various women's groups, with folders for organizations such as BITCH, National Organization of Women (NOW), NARAL and others (as well as files for anti-women's groups, such as religious right groups and "pro-family" groups like Phyllis Schafly's). A look through these external organization files shows that FOCAS formed close ties and coordinated activities with many women's groups, including WISE (Women for the Inclusion of Sexual Expression) and NOW. This coalition activity achieves the goal put forth in the FOCAS mission statement in which the founders (a core group of eight women) stated the group's intention to "maintain and expand a multi-issue action oriented Women's Liberation coalition in the NYC area."
The FOCAS Collection's internal organization files document the group's divisive separation from its socialist roots and mark its development into one of the earliest, most successful independent manifestations of the Women's Liberation movement. The Collection offers an inside look at an internecine battle and a struggle for identity that is representative of battles like it that occurred all across various sectors of the women's movement in the late sixties and early seventies. The Collection's internal files also follow FOCAS as it works to establish a non-patriarchal, non-hierarchical, coalition-based operating structure that crosses ethnic, racial, sexual, and political categories. Researchers interested in tracing the genesis and evolution of a representative women's organization from the 1970s will find this structural aspect of the FOCAS Collection valuable.
