Women's Studies: Women's History on the Web

This database describes and links to over 600 digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States. These diverse collections range from Ancestral Pueblo pottery to interviews with women engineers from the 1970s. Ken Middleton, who curates this site, also has an older annotated timeline with links here.

Diotima serves as an interdisciplinary resource for anyone interested in patterns of gender around the ancient Mediterranean and as a forum for collaboration among instructors who teach courses about women and gender in the ancient world. This site includes course materials, the beginnings of a systematic and searchable bibliography, and links to many on-line resources, including articles, book reviews, databases, and images.

This useful website covers journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages. Because of the explosion of research in Women's Studies during the past two decades, scholars and students interested in women during the Middle Ages find an ever-growing flood of publications.

ViVa stands for "Vrouwengeschiedenis in het Vaktijdschrift," which is Dutch for "Women's History in Professional Journals." ViVa is a current bibliography of women's and gender history in historical and women's studies journals. Articles in English, French, German, Dutch, Scandinavian languages, and, occasionally Spanish, are selected from 180 European, American, Canadian, Asian, Australian and New Zealand journals. All bibliographic descriptions are stored in the ViVa database. It now contains more than 12,000 records describing articles from 1975 onwards.

Monastic Matrix is an ongoing collaborative effort by an international group of scholars of medieval history, religion, history of art, archaeology, religion, and other disciplines, as well as librarians and experts in computer technology. Their goal is to document the participation of Christian women in the religion and society of medieval Europe and to collect and make available all existing data about all professional Christian women in Europe between 400 and 1600 C.E.

The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project consists of an electronic collection of primary source materials relating to the Salem witch trials of 1692 and a new transcription of the court records. The Documentary Archive is created under the supervision of Professor Benjamin C. Ray, University of Virginia. The Transcription project is supervised by Professor Bernard Rosenthal, University of Binghamton.

In the early 1970s the Suffragists Oral History Project, under the auspices of the U.C. Berkeley's Bancroft Library's Regional Oral History Office, collected interviews with twelve leaders and participants in the woman's suffrage movement. Under the running title of "The Suffragists: From Tea-Parties to Prison," those interviews are now available online through this webpage. Women profiled online include Jessie Haver Butler, Miriam Allen de Ford, Ernestine Kettler, Laura Ellsworth Seiler, and Sylvie Thygeson.

This handsome website contains video, audio, timelines and primary and secondary documents and essays related to these two great suffragists. The website is a companion to a PBS documentary of the same title by Ken Burns and Paul Barnes. Click the Resources link at the bottom of the homepage and then explore the left frame options. By the way, we own the full video in our collection.

Part of the "American Memory" digital archive of the Library of Congress, this website provides access to the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Collection, which consists of 167 books, pamphlets and other artifacts documenting the suffrage campaign. They are a subset of the Library's larger collection donated by Carrie Chapman Catt, longtime president of the NAWSA. The collection includes works from the libraries of other members and officers of the organization including: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Alice Stone Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Smith Miller, Mary A. Livermore.

The Voices of Feminism Oral History Project documents the persistence and diversity of organizing for women in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century. Narrators include labor, peace, and anti-racism activists; artists and writers; lesbian rights advocates; grassroots anti-violence and anti-poverty organizers; and women of color reproductive justice leaders. Explore names in the left frame. Transcripts are provided to the interviews and a view video clips are also available.

This site lists scores of names from "our scientific and technical past." Links are checked and links added. It includes very brief (often just one line) biographies, some photographs, and a bibliography for further reading. Useful primarily as a simple name-finder.

HEARTH, from Cornell, is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. "Titles published between 1850 and 1950 were selected and ranked by teams of scholars for their great historical importance. The first phase of this project focused on books published between 1850 and 1925 and a small number of journals. The full text of these materials, as well as bibliographies and essays on the wide array of subjects relating to Home Economics, are all freely accessible on this site." An important early field for women that dealt with many still-studied family issues.

Primarily of interest to those researching the important social reformer, Jane Addams, this "history website that has been constructed at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is sponsored by the College of Architecture and the Arts and the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum." There are six major sections: Historical Narrative, Timeline, Images, Geography, Teachers' Resources, and Search. Each section has a different focus and strategy to engage viewers in the subject matter. Included are plenty of historical documents (including letters, newspaper and magazine articles, memoirs, unpublished manuscripts).

The Feminist Majority Foundation hosts these webpages. Although the presentation is rather awkward, The Feminist Chronicles is a useful chronology of second wave women's rights activism in this country. In part II you will find a year-by-year presentation of key events in feminist struggles. There are a few documents of second wave feminism also reproduced here.

This Fordham University "sourcebook attempts to present online documents and secondary discussions which reflect the various ways of looking at the history of women within broadly defined historical periods and areas. " Explore from the left frame or start drilling down into the contents further down the page by period and location. Lots of linked pages.

Here is a list of books about a variety of famous women with ties to Boston. Check our catalog if you want to know if we own one you are interested in.

Boston has a rich heritage of women's history and this website seeks to celebrate that fact. Most interesting is the Tours page. Click on one of the areas on the map for a more specific map and list of historical sights.