The Emma Biddlecom Sweet Papers includes correspondence from her friend, Carrie Chapman Catt, as well as other correspondents, including Lucy E. Anthony, Mary S. Anthony, Susan B. Anthony, Mary T. L. Gannett, William Channing Gannett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Maud Nathan, Rush Rhees, Anna Howard Shaw and Booker T. Washington. Many of the letters are in connection with a lecture series sponsored by the Political Equality Club. Other material in the collection consists of manuscript and printed records of the national and local suffrage movement and photographs. Suffrage pamphlets that were also part of the collection are now cataloged and shelved with the Department's book collection. Also found in the collection are personal legal papers, financial records, and photographs related to Emma B. Sweet, her family, and her husband Fred G. Sweet, who was an employee of the City of Rochester.

The collection includes the correspondence and other papers of William Channing Gannett (1840-1923), who was a Unitarian minister in St. Paul, Minnesota (1877-1883) and Rochester, N.Y. (1889-1908). The correspondence to and from Mr. Gannett includes letters from Jane Addams, Abigail May Alcott, Susan B. Anthony, Samuel Longfellow, Elihu Root, Alphonso and William Howard Taft, Booker T. Washington, Frank Lloyd Wright and many Unitarian leaders of the late 1800s and early 1900s. There are also letters relating to the Western Unitarian Controversy, the education of the freedmen at Port Royal, the temperance crusade, Unity magazine, Unitarian church organization and membership, and to the editing of Unity Hymns and Chorals by Mr. Gannett and Frederick L. Hosmer. About 400 letters, dated 1875-1912, were added to the collection by Charles H. Lyttle and relate to the Western Unitarian Controversy.

This collection contains additions to the collection of William Channing Gannett Papers (A.G18). Mr. Gannett was a prominent Unitarian minister in St. Paul, Minn. (1877-1883) and Rochester, N. Y. (1889-1908).