The records of the Woman’s National Democratic Club span the years 1912-2014, with the bulk of the material dating from 1922 to 1998. The collection contains correspondence, financial and administrative records, legal records, notes, newsletters, membership directories and card files, oral history transcripts, photographs, Democratic presidential campaign memorabilia and ephemera, newspaper clippings, and other printed matter. The records are in English and are organized in eighteen series: Administrative File, Building and Grounds, Special Collections, History of the Club, Photographic File, Membership File, Public Policy Committee, Woman’s National Democratic Club Political Action Committee, Woman’s National Democratic Club Educational Foundation, Program Committee, Events, Public Relations, Fundraising, Newsletters and Bulletins, Election Memorabilia, Democratic Party Subject File, Woman's National Democratic Club Educational Foundation Addendum, and Oversize.

The records of the Woman’s National Democratic Club trace nine decades of the club’s political outreach to women. The organization was founded in 1922, a few years after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, to provide a social setting in which women could engage in political discussion and organize on behalf of the Democratic Party. It recruited members nationally, offering its clubhouse as a Washington, D. C., base for visiting women who were active in the Democratic Party in other parts of the country. The club was also a local Washington institution and one of the earliest efforts to organize Democratic women in the capital. In a membership-recruitment letter dated July 5, 1922, filed in the Special Collections series, Florence Jaffray (“Daisy”) Harriman noted that “Washington is becoming more and more the centre of political activity, and therefore it seems the natural place to have a rallying point.” The club’s committee records, in particular, provide insight into the web of local associations, friendships, and face-to-face relationships that were fostered by the club and which influenced national politics. Place is also important in terms of the organization’s clubhouse. Designed by architect Harvey L. Page in 1892, the Whittemore House was purchased by the Woman’s National Democratic Club in 1927. The collection documents this historically significant building’s use as a clubhouse, as well as its architectural expansions and renovations.

Another prominent feature of the collection is the role played by the Woman’s National Democratic Club (WNDC) as a forum for national policy debate. Soon after its founding, the club began hosting speakers and organizing forums covering a wide array of national policy issues. The clubhouse became an important venue for national leaders to present current legislative, policy, and program initiatives ranging from New Deal and Great Society domestic programs to international affairs. The full scope of this programming is documented in the Program Committee series. Further evident in the collection are the club’s efforts to document and chronicle its own history. Chief among these endeavors was an oral history project overseen by Jewell Fenzi and published by the Woman’s National Democratic Club Educational Foundation in 2000. The collection contains member profiles and interview transcripts generated by the project that not only document the role generations of prominent women played in running the organization, but also the trajectory of their working careers, political activism, and civic leadership outside the club. Finally, the collection includes ephemera from presidential elections spanning John W. Davis’s campaign in 1924 to Barack Obama’s in 2008. Also included are early brochures, flyers, and other printed ephemera produced by the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee. The contents of the collection’s eighteen series are described in more detail in the Description of Series section of the finding aid.