This is a guide to gender history and women's history in scholarship and primary source collections at Boston College.
Primary Sources in British Women's History
This page provides access points to multiple different collections relating to women in modern British History. These sources include texts written by women and texts about women.
Interface in English and French (and other major, European languages). Majority of the content in French.
France's fantastic digital library from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Digitized periodicals, images, recordings, and more. Covers two millenia with particular strength from 1500 to the present.
Open Access.
A digital repository for the nation's research libraries, HathiTrust brings together the digitized book and serial collections of major universities and other partner institutions, a significant portion of which is in the public domain and available full text. Boston College's status as a partner makes it possible for members of the Boston College community to download any of the out-of-copyright items as PDFs.
Boston College Libraries is one of many research libraries contributing scanned images of works outside of copyright. Read online or download in various formats for various e-book readers. Download options include PDF, EPUB, Kindle, DAISY (ANSI/NISO Z39.86 open format), and others.
The World Digital Library is a Library of Congress project sponsored by UNESCO. Items in this digital library, including books, manuscripts, photographs, maps and sound recordings, are individually described and searchable in seven languages. Most countries and regions around the world are represented.
Covers the study of international women's history, feminism and the feminist movement and consists of periodicals, books, and pamphlets in 15 languages.
The Shelley-Godwin Archive will provide the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, bringing together online for the first time ever the widely dispersed handwritten legacy of this uniquely gifted family of writers.
Take a journey through the personal, political and economic struggles that have symbolised women's battle for equality over the past 500 years, through a representative selection of the broad range of materials in LSE Library and The Women's Library @ LSE. A chronological presentation of more than 300 items from the 16th Century to the present day.
Women's Studies Archive: Women's Issues and Identities focuses on the social, political, and professional achievements of women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.
A database of primary documents that includes the diaries and letters of women from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Access writings by full text searching (simple or advanced) or by exploring the tables of contents.
Perdita means "lost woman" and the goal of the Perdita Project has been to find early modern women authors who were "lost" because their writing exists only in manuscript form. The more than two hundred and thirty manuscripts in the site were written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and they have been sourced from archives and libraries across the United Kingdom and the USA.
Women Writers Online is a full-text collection of early women's writing in English, published by the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University. It includes full transcriptions of texts published between 1526 and 1850, focusing on materials that are rare or inaccessible.
Flow Data is part of UK Data Service Census Support, providing data and user support for anyone interesting in using flow data from the UK Census. Census flow data (also referred to as interaction data) relate to the movement of people between places.
Social Explorer is a research tool designed to provide quick and easy access to historical census data and demographic information. It creates maps and reports to help users visually analyze and understand demography and social change throughout history. Currently includes the entire US Census history from 1790 to 2000, all annual updates from the American Community Survey. Users can customize, save, print, and email maps and reports and export them to a variety of programs and statistical packages for further analysis and use in reports and presentations.
WomenWatch is the central gateway to information and resources on the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women throughout the United Nations system, including the United Nations Secretariat, regional commissions, funds, programmes, specialized agencies and academic and research institutions. Includes Session Reports.
Topics: Education; Health; Nutrition; Labor and Political Participation. Statistics by country and region.
2000, 2004 and 2008 data with mapping feature.
Bess of Hardwick’s Letters contains the complete correspondence, ca.1550-1608, of Bess of Hardwick. Bess of Hardwick (ca.1521/2-1608) is one of Elizabethan England’s most famous figures.
Queen Victoria's Journals reproduces as high-resolution, colour images every page of the surviving volumes of Queen Victoria's journals, from her first diary entry in 1832 to shortly before her death in 1901, along with separate photographs of the many illustrations and inserts within the pages. Each page has also been transcribed and re-keyed, allowing for journals to be searched.
The archive contains over 1 million documents in nearly three thousand archive boxes currently occupying around 300 metres of shelving. The papers date from Margaret Thatcher's childhood to the end of her life, and include tens of thousands of photographs, as well as a vast collection of press cuttings, and many audio and video tapes of public and private events. Thatcher never kept a diary, but the archive includes rich details of her role in important domestic and world events.
This is a search for a variety of women's letters, autobiographies, journals, diaries, and memoirs at O'Neill Library. Because of the imperfect nature of metadata, some of these texts will be scholarship.
"In 1918 the Representation of the People Act granted some women the right to vote in parliamentary elections, and the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 gave men and women equal voting rights for the first time. Explore short articles and examine scrapbooks, political pamphlets, photographs and posters to discover how suffragists and suffragettes campaigned for this democratic right."
Primary source material focusing on women's international activism since the mid-nineteenth century with content from international agencies like the United Nations, Women's Africa Committee as well as from national agencies with emphasis on the U.S., U.K., and India. Includes proceedings of women's international conferences, books, pamphlets, articles from newspapers and journals, as well as diary entries, and memoirs.
Primary source material focusing on women's international activism since the mid-nineteenth century with content from international agencies like the United Nations, Women's Africa Committee as well as from national agencies with emphasis on the U.S., U.K., and India. Includes proceedings of women's international conferences, books, pamphlets, articles from newspapers and journals, as well as diary entries, and memoirs.
Eliza Fay left England for India in 1779. Her original letters describe experiences in India, including sati, details of imprisonment in Calicut and the legal separation from her husband.
Primary sources on work in 'sweatshop' industries during the early 20th century, including documents relating to conditions of women workers. This collection is in the process of being digitised - more will be added over the next year.
Eight documents from the Parliamentary Archives and the Women's Library were recognised by UNESCO on their Memory of the World UK Register in 2011 and are displayed together for International Women's Day in 2012
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 over seventy interviews with women from Brazil, China, India, Nicaragua, Poland, Russia, and the United States.
Link to a search using BC catalog for women's autobiographies, diaries, letters, and memoirs. Because of the nature of metadata, the search is imperfect and users are recommended to play with it.
Collections at Burns involving or authors by British (English, Scottish, or Welsh) women. Check out the associated "Finding Aid" PDF under "Local Collection Name."
