LibGuides: Women's & Gender Studies: Primary Sources & Archives

Primary Source Collections @ Memorial Library

British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
From from women writing from 1500 to 1950.
Approximately 100,000 pages of published letters and diaries, including several thousand pages of previously unpublished materials. Drawn from 290 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings, much of the material is in copyright. Represented are all age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous and the not so famous.

Part of the ProQuest Primary Sources Collection.
Gerritsen Women's History Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs This link opens in a new window
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Books, pamphlets and periodicals reflecting the evolution of a feminist consciousness and the movement for women's rights.
In the late 1800's, Dutch physician Aletta Jacobs and her husband C.V. Gerritsen began collecting books, pamphlets and periodicals reflecting the evolution of a feminist consciousness and the movement for women's rights. The Gerritsen Collection has since become the greatest single source for the study of women's history in the world.
Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires Since 1820 This link opens in a new window
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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.

Part of the ProQuest Primary Sources Collection.
Women's Magazine Archive This link opens in a new window
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Backfiles of leading women's interest consumer magazines.
Issues are scanned in high-resolution color and feature detailed article-level indexing. Coverage ranges from the late-19th century through to 2005 and these key primary sources permit the examination of the events, trends, and attitudes of this period.

Title list:
keywords: women, gender

Mainstream Periodicals

American Periodicals This link opens in a new window
Find the full text of early articles on topics related to women's and gender studies, women in society, etc.
Periodicals published between 1740 and 1940, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines and many other historically-significant periodicals.

Part of the ProQuest Primary Sources Collection.
Readers' Guide Retrospective: 1890-1982 This link opens in a new window
Indexes articles from popular US & Canadian periodicals published between 1890 and 1982, covering current events & news, fine arts, fashion, education, business, sports, health, consumer affairs, etc.

Digital Collection Portals

These digitization projects are freely available online to researchers.

Barnard College Center for Research on Women
The Digital Feminist Archive offers a snapshot of feminist history in the 1960s and 1970s, the institutionalization of women’s centers and women’s studies as an academic discipline, and feminist struggles taking place at colleges and universities, in healthcare and social service centers, in political organizations and neighborhood meetings across the country.
Duke University Library, Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture
Online archive collections include primary source materials from the Women's Liberation Movement, African-American Women, and Civil War Women.
Lesbian Herstory Archives Digital Collections
The Lesbian Herstory Archives has the world's largest collection of materials by and about Lesbians. Digital collections include audio, video and photographs. Enjoy a taste of this collection by visiting their Online Photo Sampler.
Library of Congress collections about women's history
National Archives and Records Administration
A guide to researching women's history through the United States National Archives. Subjects include African-American women, families and children, suffrage, temperance, women in the military, and other subject areas related to women's history.
Schlesinger Library
The Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America documents the lives of women of the past and present for the future and furthers the Radcliffe Institute's commitment to women, gender, and society. Digitized collections include Susan B. Anthony and the Black Women’s Oral History Project.
Harvard University Library
Collections include Women Working, 1800-1930, thousands of digitized pages and images including 7,500 pages of manuscripts, 3,500 books and pamphlets and 1,200 photographs.
Digital Transgender Archive
An “international collaboration among more than twenty colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, and private collections” aiming to create “a generative point of entry into the fascinating and expansive world of trans history.”

Other Archives

These tools will help you locate women's and gender studies archives.

Archive Grid
Provides access to detailed archival collection descriptions, making information available about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and other archival materials.
Discovering American Women's History Online
Provides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States. Browse the database by subject (150+ entries), place (i.e., states), time period, and primary source type.