The Laura X Institute is the home of Laura’s Social Movements Archives, which features documents, media, and other materials collected by Laura X aka Laura Rand Orthwein, Jr., over the last fifty years, pertaining to the women’s movement and a wide array of precursors and overlapping social movements from the second half of the 20th century, with special emphasis on how the women’s movement established women’s rights as human rights, including materials from Laura X’s successful state by state campaign to abolish the legal privilege for marital and date rape.

The important reservoirs of tens of thousands of documents from local, national and international sources that constitute Laura’s Social Movements Archives have been carefully preserved and maintained for historical research and presentation.

The collection is derived from Laura’s participation in an extensive array of social movements, including the anti-nuke, peace, civil rights, Free Speech, women’s rights, and environmental movements; her life in St. Louis and beyond ; the organizations she founded; the materials produced by her for her organizing work around the country; materials produced by other organizations which she collected for posterity?; and smaller collections donated to her (other movements Laura has been involved in are covered in her biography below).

The Institute’s archive staff and volunteers are currently engaged in sorting, cataloging, and assigning “finding aids” to the 580 boxes of materials, in order to keep them vibrant, accessible, and available for researchers, curators, film makers, and other interested parties.

Once finished, the Institute’s Archive will be a resource for students, professors, historians, film documentarians, museums, exhibitions, high school teachers, activists, and other members of the general public.

A prior collection by Laura X, covering up to 1974, was converted to microfilm and donated by the Women’s History Research Center (WHRC) to the National Women’s History Project and has been distributed through Primary Source Media/Cengage Learning (http://www.gale.cengage.com/psm/) to some 450 libraries and collections in 14 countries. A brief description of this prior project is included below, as an illustrative example, because the material types and topics from the prior microfilm collection provide a good description of the aspects of Laura X’s current collection relating to the women’s movement.