Guides: Primary Sources: Themes

Women in Literature

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century
From the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, focuses on the writers who founded the African American women's literary tradition.

Victorian Women Writer's Project
Indiana University Libraries project to digitize works by British women writers of the 19th century.

Primary source books on Women

Many primary sources are available as collections in books found using the Novanet Libraries Search
For example, you can do a SUBJECT KEYWORD search on WOMEN DIARIES to locate diaries written by women.

Ideas for subject keyword searches include:

Nova Scotia diaries (also try other locations or provinces)
Nova Scotia correspondence
women diaries
Acadians diaries
person's name diaries

Posters

North American Women

These sites are subscription based and require your Mount login.

Gerritsen Collection of Women's History (ProQuest)
Collection of books, pamphlets and periodicals reflecting the evolution of a feminist consciousness and the movement for women's rights.
Women and Social Movements in the United States: 1600-2000 (CRKN - Alexander Street Press)
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 currently includes 65 document projects with 1,800 documents, and more than 23,000 pages of additional full-text documents. It includes as well book, film and website reviews and teaching tools.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries (CRKN - Alexander Street)
The immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online - ECCO (CRKN - Gale)
Contains digitized texts of over 183,000 titles published during the 18th Century.
North American Women's Drama (CRKN - Alexander Street Press)
This edition of North American Women's Drama contains 1021 plays by 247 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more.

American Women

Women Working, 1800-1930
500,000 digitized pages and images including manuscripts, pamphlets and photographs.
Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement - Duke Special Collection
Manifestos, speeches, essays, and other materials documenting various aspects of the Women's Movement in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.
Discovering American Women's History Online
Gateway to 405 digital collections of primary sources - photos, letters, diaries, artifacts etc. - documenting women in U.S. history.

European Women

These sites are subscription based and require your Novel login.

Defining Gender 1450-1910
A collection of primary source documents on gender relations in England from the late Middle Ages to the early twentieth century.
British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries (CRKN - Alexander Street Press)
This edition of British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries includes the immediate experiences of approximately 500 women, as revealed in over 100,000 pages of diaries and letters.
Past Masters (CRKN - Intelex )
A collection of 117 full-text databases of the writings of leading scholars and creative writers of the past. Particularly strong for women's writings from the 18th century to the early 20th century.

LGBTQ+

LGBT Thought and Culture (Alexander Street Press)
LGBT Thought and Culture is an online resource hosting the key works and archival documentation of LGBT political and social movements throughout the 20th century and into the present day. The collection contains 150,000 pages of rare archival content, including seminal texts, letters, periodicals, speeches, interviews, and ephemera.