Primary - HIST 352 - Women/Gender/Sex in U.S. History

Primary Source keyword/type examples

Use these terms as keywords in your search to help you find primary sources related to your subject. Try to think about in what format/genre the information might have been recorded in.

correspondence
pamphlets
sources
diaries
personal narratives
speeches
interviews
oral history / oral histories / oral narratives
documents
archives
microfilm

Searching using primary source types/genres

Another option is to search for your topic, then look at the refining options via "Genre," and then look for some primary source term, as mentioned above.

Finding sources on the Web

Some ways to help you find sources through the Internet is to think about who would collect, preserve, archive, or disseminate such materials/subject matter you are interested in (archives, institutions, colleges, organizations, governments, etc.)
Search your subject or related terms and add in terms like: digitized, archives, digital collection, personal narratives, diary(ies), correspondence, etc.

Example1: Jane Addams Digitized

Example 2: Chinese exclusion act digital collection

Example 3: Carrie Nation digital archive

Example 4: 19th amendment digital collection

Example 5: women's suffrage digital collection

Database Sources

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (scholar's edition) This link opens in a new window
Fantastic collection of themed essays and primary source documents. Try browsing by person, movement or subject. Advanced search allows for a lot of control in your searches.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
You can search JSTOR for primary sources by limited the date to your period in question (articles go back to 1890, and British pamphlets to 1800). For instance, you could search in Health Sciences titles for articles on women's health. Searching the Item Type Pamphlet can be particularly useful for sources as well.
Readers' Guide Retrospective: 1890-1982 (H.W. Wilson) [EBSCOhost] This link opens in a new window
This is a database that indexes popular and trade magazines back to 1890. Again, limit your search to a specific date range to get a sense of public opinion of or major events surrounding your topic.
New York Times (ProQuest Historical Newspapers) [1851-2020] This link opens in a new window
This database provides the full text of all issues back through 1851. Narrow your date range as much as possible and use very specific keywords to avoid getting too many results.
Chicago Tribune (ProQuest) 1849-1999 This link opens in a new window
Subject: Interdisciplinary
Content/Description: Provides full-text newspaper articles from the Chicago Tribune from 1849-1998.

Primary sources outside the library

Alice Paul Institute
The Alice Paul Institute is dedicated to providing quality assistance to researchers of all ages who want to learn more about Alice Paul, women’s suffrage in the U.S., and the Equal Rights Amendment.
American Friends Service Committee Archives
More than just a collection of records pertaining to one organization’s history, the AFSC’s archive provides a unique and singular view of the social, political, and economic movements that shaped the 20th Century and are still relevant today.
American Memory from the Library of Congress
Another of the many digital collections from the Library of Congress
American Radicalism from MSU
The Radicalism Collection includes books, pamphlets, periodicals, posters, and ephemera covering a wide range of viewpoints on political, social, economic, and cultural issues and movements in the United States and throughout the world.
American Women: Resources from the Performing Arts Collections
Part of the American Women Series, this guide highlights collections and resources in the Music Division that document the lives and work of significant women in music, theater, and dance.
American Women Series from Library of Congress
Archives of Women's Political Communication
From Iowa State University: The Archives of Women's Political Communication was launched in 2007 by the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University. The goal of the archives is to showcase and preserve women’s political discourse and promote lifelong learning of women in political leadership throughout the world.
Black Women's Suffrage
The content featured in this collection explores linkages between women’s suffrage and other social causes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (anti-slavery, anti-lynching, education reform and civil rights) as well as racism within the Suffrage Movement.
Chicana por mi Raza
Chicana por mi Raza began collecting oral histories in 2009. Since then, the CPMR team has interviewed more than 80 women. From these interviews we've collected and processed approximately 10,000 archival items, with 3000 or so awaiting digitizing, description and uploading. Most of the oral histories consist of several hours of film footage, and some women have been interviewed more than once. Our online digital repository currently contains approximately 7,000 available digital records and over 500 interview clips.
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Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective is a group of researchers, educators, students, archivists and technologists dedicated to preserving imperiled Chicanx and Latinx histories of the long Civil Rights Era. Started by Professor Maria Cotera and filmmaker Linda Garcia Merchant in 2009, CPMR has traveled to over one dozen states to collect hundreds of hours of oral histories with notable Chicanas, Latinas, and allies.
Civil Rights Digital Library
The struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s is among the most far-reaching social movements in the nation's history, and it represents a crucial step in the evolution of American democracy. The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale.
Civil War Era from Gettysburg College
This digital repository
offers a sampling of a broader collection that includes political cartoons, letters, photographs,
maps, and artifacts relating to the Civil War Era.
Digital Transgender Archive
The purpose of the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is to increase the accessibility of transgender history by providing an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world. Based in Worcester, Massachusetts at the College of the Holy Cross, the DTA is an international collaboration among more than thirty colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, and private collections.
The Feminist Chronicles
“Instead of what the media and many scholars think women have been doing, find out what women have really been doing for the past four decades: read The Feminist Chronicles. Expanding outward from NOW, the largest feminist organization in the world, this provides a breadth, depth, and diversity that should be on every historian’s desk, and every bedside table for a nightly dose of, ‘I didn’t know that!'”

-Gloria Steinem, Noted Feminist and Author
GLBT Historical Center Archives
Primary source sets, digital collections, and more.
Global Feminisms
The Global Feminisms Project (GFP) collects interviews with women’s movement activists and women’s studies scholars in sites around the world.
The archive includes interviews with women from Brazil, China, Germany, India, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, and the United States.
Guide to American Women Series
Hearth
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. Future phases of the project will include books published between 1926 and 1950, as well as additional journals.
Herstories: Audio/Visual Collections
The Lesbian Herstory Archives is home to the world's largest collection of materials by and about lesbians and their communities. “Herstories: Audio/Visual Collections” contains digitized copies of some of the 3,000 oral history cassettes in the Archives' Spoken Word Collection and 950 videotapes in the Video Collection.
Independent Voices
Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection
The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Collection is a library of nearly 800 books and pamphlets documenting the suffrage campaign that were collected between 1890 and 1938 by members of NAWSA and donated to the Rare Books Division of the Library of Congress on November 1, 1938.
Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States
We have now posted five installments of the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States containing almost 3,000 biographical sketches of grassroots women suffragists. We will be adding to the database regularly over the next year and when complete it will include crowdsourced biographical sketches of more than 3,600 women suffrage activists, primarily concentrated in the period 1890-1920. We are aiming for an inclusive collection, including white and black suffragists, mainstream and militant suffragists. The sketches will place women's suffrage activism within the frame of women's broader social agenda, before and after the passage of the 19th Amendment in August 1920.
Schlesinger Library
From Harvard: The Arthur and Elizabeth 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.
Suffragists Oral History Project
Women's and LGBT Activism from the Digital Public Library of America
DPLA has tons of digitized materials, explore for more.
Women's Liberation Movement Print Culture
From Duke University: Manifestos, speeches, essays, and other materials documenting various aspects of the Women's Movement in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s
Women's Suffrage Memorabilia - Google slideshow
Women of Protest from Library of Congress
One of the many digital collections from the Library of Congress
Womens Suffrage in Sheet Music
Womens Suffrage Memorabilia
The primary purpose of this site is to provide a repository for information about memorabilia connected to the woman suffrage movement in both England and America. Subjects discussed here will include woman suffrage buttons, suffrage ribbons, suffrage sashes, suffrage advertising cards, suffrage jewelry, suffrage sheet music, suffrage postcards, Cinderella stamps and other aspects of suffrage ephemera. The focus is not on pamphlets and autograph material, although articles about these types of items do appear on occasion.
Women Working 1800-1930
An exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. From Harvard U.
Digital Public Library of America
Growing searchable portal to digital archival content around the country. Check primary source sets!

HIST 352 - Women/Gender/Sex in U.S. History: Primary

Primary vs. Secondary

Primary Source keyword/type examples

Searching using primary source types/genres

Finding sources on the Web

Database Sources

Primary sources outside the library