Primary and Historical Sources

  • Women's Rights Collections 1880-1990 in ProQuest History Vault: Primary source materials that tell the story of the women and voting rights and reproductive rights at national, regional and local levels.

  • North American Women's Letters and DiariesA full-text primary source database that includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters.

  • Women Writers Online: 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.

  • American Periodicals: Digitized images of the pages of 1000 American magazines and journals published between 1741 and 1805. Titles include Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine, the first American professional journals, and several consumer magazines still in publication, such as Vanity Fair, Harper's Magazine, and Ladies' Home Journal.

  • Women Working, 1800-1930Digital exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression.  Women Working is part of the Harvard University Library Open Collections Program.