Probably no name in the history of American decorative arts is more widely recognized than that of Louis Comfort Tiffany. Hear his name, and you immediately pictures his signature jewel-toned lamps and vases. See one of those objects, and you immediately think of his name.

But scholars have now discovered that the complete identity between the name and the designs, which Tiffany himself strived to create, has for a century hidden the significant contributions of other designers and artists. An exhibition opening next week at the New-York Historical Society, “A New Light on Tiffany,” promises to change how we see these objects. Focusing on a designer named Clara Driscoll and the group of women known as the “Tiffany girls” who worked with her in the glass-cutting department of Tiffany Studios, the exhibition explodes the myth of Tiffany as the company’s sole designer, and offers a new inside view of the workings of the studios.

The exhibition was made possible by the discovery of Driscoll’s letters by two of the show’s curators, an emeritus professor of art history at Rutgers University, Martin Eidelberg, and a former associate curator of decorative arts at the N-YHS, Nina Gray. Driscoll, who was born in Ohio, wrote numerous letters to her mothers and sisters describing her life in New York and her career at Tiffany, where she worked from 1888 until around 1909. The letters provide the story behind the objects in the exhibition — primarily lampshades, including the Dragonfly, Wisteria, and Poppy models, but also mosaics and small desk objects — that Driscoll designed.

“It’s one of the first first-hand accounts of the inner workings of Tiffany Studios,” Ms. Gray said. “It will give people a picture of how the objects came to be, and what were the specific interrelationships between all of the various divisions.”

Tiffany employees were segregated by gender, as was common in many workplaces at the time, Ms. Gray said. The women worked at the Tiffany headquarters, in a building that still stands on the southeast corner of 25th Street and Park Avenue South, while the men worked at the Tiffany factory in Corona. In a hierarchy composed of designers, selectors, and assistants, the women designed and executed leaded floral-patterned lampshades, as well as landscapes and mosaics.

Driscoll was head of the women’s glass-cutting department, Mr. Eidelberg, who is the author of “The Lamps of Louis Comfort Tiffany,” said. “Under her were women who performed the role of selectors: They literally selected the glass for this flower or that leaf,” he explained. “That’s an intricate job, because this is complex glass with veining and different colors in it, so you want to find an interesting portion of it. So the selector would indicate what portion and how she wanted it cut in relation to the template, and then her assistant did the actual cutting.”

Over time, some of the assistants may have risen to become selectors, he said, but there was only a limited window for advancement. Women had to leave Tiffany once they married — although “if you then had the good fortune of becoming a widow,” Mr. Eidelberg added, “you could come back.” Driscoll was engaged three times and married twice: first to Mr. Driscoll, who was 30 years older than her and died within a few years, and then to a British import/export man, whom she married in 1909, ending her career at Tiffany.

As Driscoll’s letters reveal, relationships between the men and women at Tiffany were not always friendly. The men were unionized, while women were not permitted to join the union. In 1903, the men threatened to go on strike, demanding an end to Tiffany’s employment of women. Eventually, a compromise was reached, capping the number of women at the current level, which was 27. At the time, Mr. Eidelberg said, there were 35 men in the men’s cutting department just making lampshades, and many more in other divisions at the factory.

The contributions of the artists working under Tiffany have been hard to uncover, Mr. Eidelberg, said, because Tiffany was so concerned with maintaining the primacy of his name. “He controlled his publicity very carefully,” Mr. Eidelberg said. “No one’s name was ever mentioned except his own.” Furthermore, after the company went bankrupt in 1932, all the records were lost.

By that time, taste had also shifted. “When you think about New York in the ’30s, we had passed from Art Deco into Art Moderne, into the Bauhaus, and Tiffany looked like a much older style,” he said.

A specialist in the 20th century design department at Sotheby’s, Jodi Pollack, said she was delighted that scholarship was illuminating the role of individual designers in Tiffany Studios. “If you look in our catalogs, the information on the Tiffany objects in the sales is very brief and very general,” she said. “Going forward, I would love to be able to attribute certain lamp shade models to specific designers.”

The exhibition, which is also curated by the N-YHS curator of decorative arts, Margaret Hofer, will offer an occasion to consider the role of women in the decorative arts in the early 20th century. On Saturday, March 24, Initiatives in Arts and Culture, a group that organizes decorative arts conferences, will hold a symposium tied to the exhibition called “Designing Women: American Women in the Decorative Arts: 1875-1915.” A day of lectures by curators and scholars, including Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, who organized the Met’s current show, “Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall — An Artist’s Country Estate,” will be followed by an evening reception at the Lillian Nassau gallery on East 57th Street, a major dealer in Tiffany that is celebrating its 60th anniversary with back-to-back exhibitions.

There may have been a small academic skirmish over the discovery of the letters; neither Mr. Eidelberg nor Mr. Gray would answer questions about how they were found, saying they had been instructed not to comment on the subject.

In any case, the exhibition may lead to further discoveries. At the end, the curators have assembled a list of all the women they know of who worked at Tiffany Studios. “It’s hard to trace women, because their name changes [when they marry], and they may move to where their husband is working,” Mr. Eidelberg said. “One of the hopes is that people who are descendants of these women will pop up with new material.”