The Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University began documenting women's history at Brown nearly at its inception. In 1982, Founding Director Joan Wallach Scott, the first Chair of the Pembroke Center Associates (now known as the Friends of the Pembroke Center) Christine Dunlap Farnham '48, and Brown Corporation members Ruth B. Ekstrom '53 and Nancy L. Buc '65 questioned the University's handling of historical records related to the merger of Pembroke and the men's college. Due in part to this concern, the group identified a need to collect archives and began by gathering oral histories from notable alumnae. The resulting batch of interviews would create the first special collection curated by the Pembroke Center – known as Brown Women Speak until 2019 when it was renamed the Pembroke Center Oral History Project. In 1987, five years after the oral history project was launched, the Pembroke Center and the Brown University Library established a permanent women's history archive at Brown. In subsequent years, an effort was undertaken to identify women's history buried or mislabeled within the John Hay Library collections, resulting in the published in 1989. Between 1990 and 2002, the Pembroke Center's archival initiative focused on documenting women's history through oral interviews.

In 2007, the Pembroke Center reaffirmed its partnership with the John Hay Library to ensure that women's history was not being lost and that new women's history collections were being preserved. According to the agreement, the Pembroke Center would identify, process, and manage the collections, while the Hay Library would provide cataloging technologies, research services, and long-term storage. In approximately 2010, nomenclature surrounding the archives initiative evolved to describe the Christine Dunlap Farnham Archive and Feminist Theory Archive, established in 2003, as unique entities that are known collectively as the Pembroke Center Archives. In 2023, nomenclature for the Archives changed again. With advice and consent from the Pembroke Friends and to promote intuitive research, the Pembroke Center Archives ceased using "Christine Dunlap Farnham" to describe an area of collecting. Instead, the Pembroke Archives describes its collecting focus in three areas: women and gender at Brown, feminist activism in Rhode Island, and Feminist theory and thinking. Today, the Archives continue to be managed and curated by the Nancy L. Buc '65 LLD'94 hon Pembroke Center Archivist and the Assistant Archivist. Together, the staff promote access to the Archives, provide instructional sessions for college classes, and support students, faculty, and other scholars who wish to conduct primary research on gender and sexuality.

For more information on the history of women's history archives in the United States, please see "Women's Archives and Women's History", Joan Wallach Scott's comments on the dedication of the Christine Dunlap Farnham Archive, October 10, 1986.