The Lois K. Herr papers document her role as an important campaigner for women's rights in the business world and her interest in her predecessors in the suffragist and feminist movements of the early twentieth century.

The Lois Herr papers articulate first, the process, step by step, by which Herr and other pioneers of the women’s movement in the United States and the EEOC had influenced changes in corporate policy to create more equal opportunities for women in the work place. Secondly, her papers describe the process by which Herr composed and published her first book. Her papers indicate meticulous scholarship and persistent advocacy toward the goal of equality for women. Her diligent work and the work of many other pioneers in the women’s movement are well documented in her papers through correspondence, personal notes and collections of informative memoranda and news articles. Herr’s extensive compilation of AT&T and EEOC records are a significant resource for examining the issue of equal rights in the workplace.

U.S. and EEOC v. AT&T series include the records leading up to the court case include a chronological arrangement of memos, correspondence, data lists, and personal notes between Herr and other equal rights activists from the beginning of the feminist movement in the United States in the early 1960s to the settlement of the case by AT&T and EEOC. The records include information about the beginning of the National Organization for Women. Court case records begin with the Petition of Intervention by EEOC in December 1970 to the Consent Agreement and settlement in January 1973. Testimony of the officers of AT&T, as well as that of equal rights activists are also included, followed by post-settlement responses from AT&T.

The Women, Power, and AT&T series are a chronological record of the information collected by Herr to support her writing about the proceedings and impact of the court case in which she and her colleagues had participated in the early 1970s. Files also include a step-by-step look over the shoulder of the author as she methodically gathered information, persistently extracted information from those who had lived the event, and arranged the material to read like an historical novel. She tested the memories of her colleagues to critique her work and to review the manuscript when finished. The world of publishing is also described as Herr, a first time author, discovers and learns to navigate the path toward a finished product. The series further includes biographical information about most of the participants in the events mentioned in her book.

Files in the Equal Rights series include additional copies of newspaper articles, magazine essays, reports and Lois Herr’s personal files pertinent to the cause of equal rights for women and minorities. Much of the materials in Series III might seem redundant to items in Series I and Series II. However, given the abundance of such a broad variety of opinions in print devoted to the issue of equal opportunity, the materials in Series III explain the nature of change in women’s rights in the work place during the period leading up to and crossing into the twenty-first century.

The Artifacts series are a few items that were used to publicize the feminist movement, including buttons from the AT&T Women’s Alliance, a plastic shopping bag and stickers, and a tin of coal presented to each AT&T company president on January 3, 1972 as a holiday gift to the executives at the sexist company.