Resources for Women’s History Month: Exploring Historical Voices
March is Women’s History Month, and the GSU Library has a wealth of resources that will give you access to the voices of women history, reflected in diaries, letters, magazines, and a range of other formats.
The GSU Library has several databases including women’s history primary source material, including:
- The Gerritsen Collection—Women’s History Online, 1543-1945 includes materials in 15 languages, showing the evolution of feminism in a range of countries and the impact of a country’s feminist movement on other countries.
- Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 can be searched by people, subjects, and/or social movements.
- Women Writers Project, created by Brown University, includes novels, poetry, and essays written by a range of women from 1400-1850.
- Godey’s Lady’s Book, an electronic version of the popular nineteenth-century women’s magazine. Known for its fashion plates! (sort your search by “color plate fashion”).
You can also access these databases from the GSU Library’s website by clicking on “Articles / Databases.” If you are off campus, you will be asked to sign in with your CampusID and password.
These women’s history databases are freely available to the public and don’t require a login:
- Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition, History (HEARTH), a Cornell University database including full-text versions of home economic texts and related materials from 1850 through 1950 (including Good Housekeeping!)
- Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Women’s Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921, part of the Library of Congress’ massive American Memory primary-source collections.
- African-American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century, a digital library from the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
- Gifts of Speech: Women’s Speeches from Around the World, a digital library project at Sweet Briar College
The Digital Library of Georgia, a GALILEO project based at the University of Georgia, has compiled a fabulous list of primary sources showcasing Georgia women’s voices and history. Click here to check it out!
You can also find primary sources like diaries, published collections of letters, and other materials in GIL or GIL-Find. Some examples are:
- All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day, edited by Robert Ellsberg (2010)
- The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation, edited by Susan Holbrook and Thomas Dilworth
- The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is, edited by Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck (2011)
And last but certainly not least, check out GSU Special Collections’ Women’s Collection, for a wide range of sources for recent women’s history in Georgia and the South, including the Georgia Women’s Movement Oral History Project.
