Women's Studies Research Guide:
Selected Digital Primary Sources and Finding Aids

Finding Aids | Digital Full-text | Government Information

See also Microforms

---

Primary Sources - Finding Aids

Diary Research: a guide to selected library and web resources at Alderman Library.

United States Government Documents on Women, 1800-1990: a Comprehensive Bibliography
Z7964.U49 H85 1993, Alderman Reference

In the First Person: An Index to Letters, Diaries, Oral Histories and Personal Narratives
Indexes collections of oral histories, letters, diaries, autobiographies, and other personal narratives in the first-person in English from around the world, with some full text included.

Archives USA UVA only
A current directory of over 5,000 repositories and more than 120,000 collections of unpublished primary source material, with holdings and contact information. Updated regularly

A Geographic Guide to Uncovering Women's History in Archival Collections
Compiled by the librarians at the Archives for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Digital Collections of Primary Sources
From librarian Ken Middleton's site on Women's Studies.

National Archives for Black Women's History
See this description of the collections from the folks at the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House.

Guide to Materials on Women located in Alderman Library's Special Collections
Useful for locating original women's diaries in Special Collections.

Virginia Heritage: Guides to Manuscript and Archival Collections in VA
A database of over 1500 finding aids describing archives and manuscripts in eleven repositories in Virginia. Searchable by keyword and by individual institution.


Top of page

Primary Sources - Digital Full-text

Large Collections | Oral Histories only | Womens' Suffrage | Women Writers | Other

Large Collections which include diaries, letters, oral histories and other document types

In the First Person: An Index to Letters, Diaries, Oral Histories and Personal Narratives (UVA)
An index with some full-text to more than 2,500 collections of oral history in English from around the world.

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (UVA)
2,100 documents, 28,000 pages of additional full-text documents, and 1,600 primary authors. See subject list.

North American Women's Letters and Diaries (UVA)
Searchable full text database of American and Canadian women's letters and diaries written from the colonial period until 1950. 150,000 pages of diaries and letters from 1325 women .

Women's Studies in Digital Archives
From the Women's Studies Section of ACRL, a treasure trove of resources on a wide range of subjects, arranged by subject and by primary source type.

Online Archive of California
Includes the Free Speech Movement and other topics.

Hearth: Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition and History.
Searchable full-text of over 900 books and eight journals from the period of 1850-1925. This is an ongoing project from Cornell University.

Women Working, 1870-1930
From Harvard University. Digitized primary sources, text and image, document women's roles in the the US economy between the Civil War and the Great Depression.

Oral Histories only

Atla and the History of the Shameless Hussy Press 1969-1989
Founded in 1969, during the counterculture of the late 1960s in Berkeley, and the early second wave of feminism, Shameless Hussy Press was the first feminist press in the United States. This press was the first publisher of Ntozake Shange, author of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.

Oral History Projects in North America
Many links to full-text resources on a wide range of topics and events. Examples include the Women's Movement in Georgia, 1968: The Whole World Was Watching, and more.

Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive
Includes interviews with women in the movement.

NAACP Official and Civil Rights Worker: Tarea Hall Pittman
From the Earl Warren History Project in the California Online Archives

Virginia Tech Black History Oral Histories
Includes men and women. 1960's-current time period represented here.

From Porch Swings To Patios: An Oral History Project of Charlottesville Neighborhoods, 1914-1980
Ella Baylor, now deceased, grew up in the section of Charlottesville called "Kelly Town." She taught elementary school for fort-one years, and was sharply aware of the needs of the black community. Her recollections reflect these needs and how conditions have improved.

Kent State Shootings Oral Histories
Includes material from women. This collection of recordings related to the May 4, 1970 shootings of Vietnam War protestors at Kent State University includes many eyewitness accounts of the event and its aftermath.

ACT UP Oral History Interviews
A collection of interviews with surviving members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, New York, including many women.

ODU's Oral Histories: Women's Histories and Issues
Covers a range of time periods subjects including politics, the military and massive resistance.

Women's Airforce Service Pilots
From Texas Women's University. See information about more oral history from military women.

Washington Press Club's Women in Journalism

Women's Suffrage and Activism

Suffragists Oral History Project
Eight prominent suffragists represented. From the Online Archive of CAlifornia.

Votes for Women
Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1848-1921

Women of Protest
Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party

Online Women's Archives - from Duke University
Women's Liberation Movement, African-American Women and Civil War Women.

Women Writers

UVA E-TEXT: Women Writers (UVA)

The ARTFL French Women's Writers Database
A searchable database containing works by 40 French women authors from the 16th to the 19th century

Women Writer's Online
Contains the full-texts of more than 200 works by English and American women published between 1400 and 1850. From Brown University

Women Writers Resource Project
From Emory University, a collection of edited and unedited texts of women writing in English from the 17th into the 20th century. See titles classified by ethnicity, geography, genre and time here.

Victorian Women's Writer's Project
19th century novels, political pamphlets, religious tracts, children's books, poetry and more from the University of Indiana. See authors here.

Other Women's Voices
Translations of Women's Writings Before 1700

Other digital resources

The Salem Witch Trials
From The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at Alderman Library

The Dolley Madison Project
from the Virginia Center for Digital History

Breaking and Making Tradition: Women at the University of Virginia
A 2003 exhibit from Special Collections.


Top of page