Gender & Sexualities

Aggregates digital collections from around the U.S. and offers excellent tools to discover and explore them. Focuses on 17th to 21st centuries.

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.

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.

Interface and content in English.
This collection includes the text of hundreds of excellent sources spanning from antiquity to the present. The have particularly robust collections in African, East Asian, Indian, Islamic, Jewish, the history of science, women's history, and a growing "global" set.
Open Access.

More than 200 digital facsimiles of art and other ephemera created in the Mughal Empire. Many of the images include representations of women.

Thomas Roe was an English diplomat to the Mughal Empire during the 17th century. His reports describe the court and provide some depictions of the women there. Readers should keep in mind that this is a foreign man's description.

Includes digital facsimiles of sculptures, codices, tools, and more.

A new exhibition explores immigration and urbanization through an ancient lens and connects modern-day Latinos with what is for some their ancestral culture. In the first half of the first millennium, Teotihuacan, located in the Valley of Mexico, was the cultural, political, economic, and religious center of ancient Mesoamerica. Exhibit hosted in Google Arts & Culture.

Interface in English. Individual login required with free sign-up. "A collection of over 1200 PDFs of public domain books from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries ... primarily concerning English colonial America. These include court records, deeds, documentary histories, period publications, town histories, publications of historical societies, among other things."

Consists of an electronic collection of primary source materials relating to the Salem witch trials of 1692 and a new transcription of the court records.

Paintings, poetry, and more featuring or by different Wakashu (young, beautiful men). See A Third Gender in the BCL collections for an explaination.

Dozen of prints and paintings of women during the Edo period at the LOC.

Kiyohara Yukinobu was the daughter of Kusumi Morikage and the grandniece of Tan'yu_, both renowned painters of the Kano school. While Kano school artists specialized in Chinese style brushwork and subject matter, by the 17th century they were also trained in the delicate style associated with the Tosa school, whose artists focused on indigenous themes--especially portraits of Japan's "Immortal Poets."

Ike Gyokuran was a Japanese Bunjinga painter, calligrapher, and poet. She was famous in Kyoto, Japan, during her lifetime, and she remains a celebrated artist in Japan.

More than a dozen 17th, 18th, and 19th century depictions of the Virgen de Guadalupe hosted in the John Cater Brown Library.

Digital facsimiles of letters written by and books owned by Elizabeth I of England from the 16th century as well as later reprints and collections.

Texts authored by the Christina, Queen of Sweden from the 17th century and later reprints. Includes letters, maxims, and more in multiple languages including English.

Includes texts authored by Catherine II in original languages and translation. Recommended readers limit search to English.

‘Islam assigns women an integral position in society; Muslim women have always actively contributed to the cultures in which they live be it in the home, professionally, as patrons of charitable causes, or in the arts.’ Includes parts on Ottoman women.

The Ming and Qing dynasties were the very period when ancient women paintings were developing at an unprecedented rate. The amount of women painters and that of their works as well as their artistic expression through painting languages all surpassed the performances of women painters in other dynasties.
Includes samples from diverse painters across the two dynasties.

Recent decades have witnessed strong interest in Chinese women's literature, history, and culture of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) periods among scholars, researchers, and students in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, North America, Europe, and elsewhere in the world. Chinese women's writings constitute a significant resource for ground-breaking research. They have opened up critical perspectives and enriched our knowledge of many aspects of Chinese culture and society. Close to 5000 collections of poetry and other writings by individual women are recorded for the Ming and Qing periods. However, less than a quarter of these materials have survived the ravages of history, and these have mostly ended up in rare book archives in libraries in China that are difficult to access.

More than 100 photographs of women and men working in cotton mills between 1900 and 1950.

Photographs and other images of (mostly) French workers from the 19th and 20th centuries.

More than 100,000 texts about women in factories between 1900 and 1950 published in Great Britain. Includes discussions from activists and labor groups as well as law. Coverage beyond England.
Encourage users to play with fields and change search parameters.

The working heroes who fought to ensure voting rights weren't just for middle class women. Focused on 20th century England.

Entry from Prologue Magazine with embedded primary sources from the National Archives.

Photographs recording the military use of a civilian factory during WWI.

A Web site for the consideration of the intersections of gender and (print) advertising.