Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000

 

Department of the Interior employees are offered access to this database at their desktops; employees who are teleworking may access it through the Department's VPN. Others must contact a Reference Librarian for assistance.

Search Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
 

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 brings together innovative scholarship, primary documents, books, images, essays, book and Web site reviews, teaching tools, and more. It combines the analytic power of a database with the new scholarly insights of a peer-reviewed journal. Published twice a year since 2004, the database is edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin of the State University of New York at Binghamton, with an editorial board of leading scholars from around the country.

It is organized around document projects, works of scholarship that link an interpretive essay to thirty or more related primary documents, leading users step-by-step from discovery to contextual understanding. Four new document projects are added every year. Recent examples include:

  • "Free Angela Davis, And All Political Prisoners!' A Transnational Campaign for Liberation"
  • "How Did Female Protestant Missionaries Respond to the Japanese American Incarceration Experience during World War II?"
  • "How and Why Did Women in SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) Author a Pathbreaking Feminist Manifesto, 1964-1965?"

Each semiannual issue adds twenty-five hundred pages of primary source collections. These carefully curated and deeply indexed resources include:

  • The History of Woman Suffrage (six volumes, 1881-1922)
  • Proceedings of the national conventions of women's anti-slavery societies in the 1830s
  • Women's Rights Conventions (1848-1969)
  • Annual conventions of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (1874-1898)
  • Publications of the League of Women Voters (1920-2000)
  • More than fifty state reports addressing sex bias in the courts.

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 is also posting a collection of the writings of eighty black women suffragists, totaling fifteen hundred items and more than fifteen thousand pages, with links to online documents that provide access to one thousand additional writings of these activists.

These primary source collections include rare and previously inaccessible materials. They are enhanced by scholarly essays from leading historians that illuminate key historical issues in those texts and provide entry points for accessing the collections.

Altogether, the database includes one hundred-sixty thousand pages of documents written by more than 2,450 primary authors. Each update adds new material offering the latest historical scholarship and related primary materials.

A dictionary of social movements and a chronology of US women's history complement the primary sources and facilitate searching within the database.

By arrangement with Harvard University Press, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 includes all five volumes of Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary (1971-2004). Also included are previously inaccessible publications of local and state commissions on the status of women since 1963. State-by-state and year-by-year, these astonishing publications illustrate and track the full range of issues affecting the lives of American women since 1960. Commission reports are especially rich in statistical data and patrons can create their own charts using a customizable graph tool.

 

Updated November 2021

 

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