Research Guides: Women's History Month Recommendations: Databases and Open Educational Resources

Information about Women in TU databases and Open Educational Resources

Women are represented in most of our databases, but not always as thoroughly as their male counterparts, especially for materials pre-dating the 1970s. The resources listed below have a special emphasis on women and their contributions. They serve to fill in gaps left by more traditional access points.

Articles

Women's Studies International This link opens in a new window
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Includes over 300,000 records drawn from a variety of essential women's studies databases.
Women in Politics Bibliographic Database This link opens in a new window
Bibliographic references on books and articles dealing with women in politics.
Gerritsen Women's History Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs This link opens in a new window
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An award-winning archive with 264 periodical titles and over 4,000 monographs and pamphlets, the Gerritsen Women’s History Collection is a large, cross-cultural resource spanning continents and centuries to trace changes in women’s lives and political involvement. The Gerritsen Collection is noteworthy for its size, scope, and diversity. It contains substantial material relating to women's experiences in education, employment, and politics, as well as material dealing with women's lives within the home.

Creative Works

North American Women's Drama This link opens in a new window
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North American Women's Drama brings together more than 1,500 plays by more than 300 playwrights, along with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. It includes playwrights such as Marsha Norman, Beth Henley, Susan Glaspell, Sophie Treadwell, Gertrude Stein, Maria Irene Fornes, Emily Mann, Zora Neale Hurston, Jane Martin, Lynn Nottage, Theresa Rebeck, Nora Ephron, Susan Sontag, Edna Ferber, Alice Childress, Rachel Crothers, Megan Terry, and many more.

National Gallery of Art, Women and Art
Open source teaching materials for women and art.
Smithsonian Women and Music
Collection of Smithsonian's Open Educational Resources on Women and Music.
Boulanger Initiative
Advocacy group for women composers. Includes a database of female composers as well as other resources.

Archival Materials

British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
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British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries includes the immediate experiences of approximately 500 women, as revealed in over 90,000 pages of diaries and letters. The collection now includes primary materials spanning more than 300 years.
Manuscript Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
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Personal writings of women of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, displayed as high-quality images of the original manuscripts, extensively indexed and online for the first time. The letters and diaries reveal, in each woman’s own hand, the details of the authors’ daily lives, their activities and concerns, and their attitudes towards the people and world around them. The collection is drawn entirely from the extensive holdings of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts.
North American Women’s Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
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North American Women's Letters and Diaries includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters. Particular care has been taken to index this material so that it can be searched more thoroughly than ever before. The materials have been carefully chosen using leading bibliographies, supplemented by customer requests and more than 7,000 pages of previously unpublished material. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.
Women's Magazine Archive This link opens in a new window
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An archival research resource with coverage from 184 to 2005 comprising the full backfiles of leading women’s interest consumer magazines. Titles are scanned from cover to cover in high-resolution color and feature detailed article-level indexing.
Women's Suffrage Collection This link opens in a new window
The early women’s rights movement built upon the principles and experiences of other efforts to promote social justice and to improve the human condition. Collectively these efforts are known as reform. After the Civil War, many abolitionist activists joined the Temperance and Women’s Suffrage movements.
Women and Social Movements, International - 1840 to Present This link opens in a new window
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Edited by Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Sklar Women and Social Movements, International is a landmark collection of primary materials. Through the writings of women activists, their personal letters and diaries, and the proceedings of conferences at which pivotal decisions were made, this collection lets you see how women’s social movements shaped much of the events and attitudes that have defined modern life.
Women and Social Movements: Development and the Global South, 1919-2019 This link opens in a new window
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Covering a century, the database highlights and evaluates activism through individual efforts, organizational initiatives, and socio-cultural projects led by or for women in the Global South. It shows how women have negotiated power and status regarding private or public programs centered on their rights and social inclusion. Accompanying essays by leading scholars in the field outline and critique significant shifts in approaches to development, including that of a gendered “post-development” perspective.
Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires Since 1820 This link opens in a new window
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Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires since 1820 explores prominent themes in world history since 1820: conquest, colonization, settlement, resistance, and post-coloniality, as told through women’s voices. With a clear focus on bringing the voices of the colonized to the forefront, this highly-curated archive and database includes documents related to the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and United States Empires, and settler societies in the United States, New Zealand and Australia.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new window
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Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 is a resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women's history. The collection currently includes 124 document projects and archives with more than 5,100 documents and 175,000 pages of additional full-text documents, written by 2,800 primary authors. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools.
Defining Gender This link opens in a new window
It is a collection of digitized primary sources depicting gender in British history, literature, society, and culture from 1450-1910. Materials in this collection provide info about how British perceptions of gender and gender roles developed and changed. Material types include ephemera, pamphlets, commonplace books, diaries, periodicals, letters, ledgers, manuscript journals, government papers, illustrated writings on anatomy, writings on midwifery, art and fashion publications, receipt books, conduct and advice literature, poetry, novels, ballads, drama, literary manuscripts, travel writing, and more.
Gender: Identity and Social Change This link opens in a new window
Essential primary sources documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations from the nineteenth century to the present. This expansive collection offers sources for the study of women's suffrage, the feminist movement, the men’s movement, employment, education, the body, the family, and government and politics.

Smith College Women's History Archival Collection
Founded in 1942, the Sophia Smith Collection (SSC) is one of the most significant collections of women’s history in the United States that focuses on women working on behalf of other women and gender minorities. The SSC has substantive strengths in women’s reproductive rights and justice, women’s liberation movements, suffrage and civil rights, community activism, iconoclast creators, women’s economic justice, lesbian and queer communities, and women’s environmental justice. It is a collection that reflects the diversity and complexity of women’s lives and identities through the lens of social, political, and cultural change, and gender justice.
GBLT Historical Society Primary Source Set on Trans Women
This primary source set collects the stories of trans women across several decades, during which many gender paradigms shifted. Before transition was widespread, some transfeminine people lived publicly as men while privately assuming feminine clothes and personae, or performed in drag. Of these people, some of them later medically and socially transitioned; others did not. Transfeminine identity continues to be an evolving spectrum, of which the materials gathered here can only represent a small part.

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Women's History Month Recommendations

Information about Women in TU databases and Open Educational Resources

Articles

Creative Works

Archival Materials