The records of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), founded in 1890 by the merger of the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association, span the years from 1839 to 1961 but are most numerous for the period 1890-1930. These records document the organization's history and activities, and are organized into the following series: General Correspondence, Subject File, and Miscellany.

The General Correspondence series consists of correspondence with individual members and supporters of the association, and with its officials. The series also incorporates correspondence with related organizations, and with the Board of Directors, Executive Committee, and other units of NAWSA. The collection features letters from many of the leaders in the woman's rights movement, including pioneer figures such as Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Abby Kelley Foster, Helen H. Gardener, Sarah Moore Grimké, Julia Ward Howe, Florence Kelley, Mary Ashton Rice Livermore, Lucretia Mott, Anna Howard Shaw, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Emma Willard. More recent leaders are represented by Ida Husted Harper, Mary Garrett Hay, Belle Case La Follette, E. Sylvia Pankhurst, Maud Wood Park, Mary Gray Peck, Jeannette Rankin, and Rosika Schwimmer.

Other correspondents include prominent writers, reformers and political leaders such as Henry Ward Beecher, William Edgar Borah, Witter Bynner, W. H. Channing, Eugene V. Debs, Albert Einstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, William Dean Howells, Robert M. La Follette, Ben B. Lindsey, Upton Sinclair, Ainsworth Rand Spofford, Theodore Tilton, Oswald Garrison Villard, James Wolcott Wadsworth (1877-1952), Theodore Dwight Weld, and Woodrow Wilson.

The Subject File includes biographical information on some of the principal suffrage workers, a collection of antisuffrage literature, progress reports from state and local suffrage organizations affiliated with the National American Woman Suffrage Association, records relating to the work of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, formed by the merger of NAWSA's Congressional Committee with the National Woman's Party in 1917, and litigation proceedings resulting from Mrs. Frank Leslie's bequest of one million dollars to the organization. The subject file includes important material on the official organ of the association, the Woman's Journal, 1907-1949. Among the printed items in the Miscellany series is a set of indexed scrapbooks prepared by Ida Porter Boyer which document activities in the woman's rights movement as reported in the nation's newspapers and periodicals during the years 1893-1912.