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Correspondence, manuscripts, notes, drafts of speeches, appointment books, subject files, documents, photographs, memorabilia and printed materials. There are notes from her lectures on Sociology at Adelphi College in 1911-1912; papers from 1912-1932, when Perkins served on the Commission for Safety and on the Industrial Commission of New York State; the main body of the material is from the period of her cabinet office, 1933-1945; and some items from her days on the Civil Service Commission, 1946-1953. Also included are personal and family papers.

Letters written to Mrs. Josephine Sophie White Griffing relating to her interests in the emancipation of African-Americans, temperance, and woman's suffrage. It is evident that the letters have been preserved selectively from Mrs. Griffing's papers, all of them being from well-known contemporaries. Correspondents include Frederick Douglass, Charles Sumner, Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, Anna Dickinson, Lucretia Mott, William H. Seward, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Many of the letters relate to her efforts to have prominent people give lectures in support of women's suffrage. Also, a scrapbook of clippings about Mrs. Griffing's life and activities and the autograph book of George T. Driggs, a relative, which contains the signatures of prominent political and military figures, particularly members of Congress, during the late 1860s.