Women's Studies: eArchives of Women's Writings

Mary Mark Ockerbloom of the University of Pennsylvannia maintains this useful website, which links users to research information (and often full-text of public domain writings) by and about women authors, throughout the ages. Browse by category, country, ethnicity, or by name of author.

"Celebrating and documenting the creativity of Asian, Black, Latina, and Native women, VG is one of the internet's most comprehensive and well-respected academic databases for women artists of color. Through our student-generated profiles, essays, reviews, and interviews, you can engage with artists whose works put faces on difficult and important issues ranging from immigration to racial prejudice, gendered violence to community resistance." Since many of the authors are contemporary, their original works are seldom reproduced here. But you can find interviews and other primary and secondary sources.

VWWP began in 1995 at Indiana University and is primarily concerned with the exposure of lesser-known British women writers of the 19th century. The collection represents an array of genres - poetry, novels, children's books, political pamphlets, religious tracts, histories, and more. VWWP contains scores of authors, both prolific and rare. The collection devotes "time and attention to the accuracy and completeness of the texts, as well as to their bibliographical descriptions."

"An online scholarly archive consisting of E-text editions of poetry by British and Irish women written (not necessarily published) between 1789 (the onset of the French Revolution) and 1832 (the passage of the Reform Act), a period traditionally known in English literary history as the Romantic period."

This database may require payment to access the material. Women Writers Online is a full-text collection of early women’s writing in English, published by the Northeastern University Women Writers Project. It includes full transcriptions of 320 texts published between 1526 and 1850, focusing on materials that are rare or inaccessible. The range of genres and topics covered makes it a truly remarkable resource for teaching and research, providing an unparalleled view of women’s literate culture in the early modern period.

Another impressive digital collection, this one from New York Public's Digital Schomburg. After entering the site, you may browse by title, author, or by type of work. Useful biographies of included authors are also available at the site.

Popular fiction can be a fascinating mirror on society. This website, which grew out of Felicia L. Carr's dissertation entitled "All For Love: Gender and Class and the Woman's Dime Novel in Nineteenth-Century America," handsomely presents both critical/secondary materials and limited primary materials on popular fiction written for women readers of the late nineteenth century.

Focusing on female contributions to the United States economy, "Women Working, 1800 - 1930" provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections. The collection features approximately 500,000 digitized pages and images including 7,500 pages of manuscripts,3,500 books and pamphlets and 1,200 photographs.

The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture in Duke University’s Rubenstein Library acquires, preserves and makes available to a large population of researchers published and unpublished materials that reflect the public and private lives of women, past and present.

Presents images that depict this broad range of tactics as well as individual portraits of organization leaders and members. The photographs span from about 1875 to 1938 but largely date between 1913 and 1922 and relate to activism for suffrage and the ERA.