March is Women’s History Month, a time to honor the generations of women who have shaped history and to reflect on the ongoing pursuit of equity and opportunity.
UC San Diego Library provides access to many databases to support research in women’s history and gender studies. These collections include primary sources, archival collections, newspapers and academic journals that cross time periods and disciplines. Find these databases and more in our list of A-Z Databases.
Abstracts and some full-text articles from more than 1500 publications, offering a multidisciplinary focus on gender issues.
A full text database of publications that focus on the impact of gender across a broad spectrum of subject areas. 1970s-present.
History Vault: Women’s Studies
Collections from the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College focus on voting rights, national politics, and reproductive rights. The Margaret Sanger Papers also focus on reproductive rights. Also includes documentation on events such as the founding of the National Woman’s Party, the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, legal cases involving Margaret Sanger and reproductive rights, and the passage in Congress of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Contains more than 1,000 plays by hundreds of playwrights, written from Colonial times to the present. Many of the works are rare, hard to find, or out of print. Almost a quarter of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays.
North American Women’s Letters and Diaries
This collection includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters. The collection also includes biographical sketches of people represented in this database.
Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires Since 1820
With a clear focus on bringing the voices of the colonized to the forefront, this archive and database includes documents related to the Hapsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and United States empires, and settler societies in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. A large section focuses on the voices of Native Women in North America.
Women and Social Movements in the United States Since 1600
Database of digitized books, images, documents, essays and bibiographies documenting women’s reform activities in the U.S., mostly from the 19th and 20th centuries.
Women and Social Movements, International: 1840 to present
Through the writings of women activists, their personal letters and diaries, and the proceedings of conferences at which pivotal decisions were made, this collection lets you see how women’s social movements shaped much of the events and attitudes that have defined modern life.
Women and Social Movements: Development and the Global South, 1919–2019
Through the collection of documents that reflect the evolution of transnational feminism, Women and Social Movements, Development in the Global South, 1919-2019 (WASD) highlights individual efforts, organizational initiatives, and socio-cultural projects led by or for women. The database reflects upon how women have negotiated power and status regarding private or public programs centered on economic and social rights and greater inclusion. In doing so, it highlights the historical problem of women’s invisibility within mainstream international development programs, foreign aid regimes, and approaches to technical assistance.
A searchable archive of leading women’s interest magazines, dating from the 19th century through to the 21st. Subject coverage includes consumer culture, economics/marketing, family life, fashion, gender studies, health and fitness, home/interior design, popular culture, and social history.
This resource includes collections concerning women’s history from across the globe and from a wide range of sources. Focusing on the evolution of feminism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the archive provides materials on women’s political activism, such as suffrage, birth control, pacifism, civil rights, and socialism, and on women’s voices, from female-authored literature to women’s periodicals.
Image Credit: Data collection from bathythermograph records, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, October 16, 1968. SIO Photographic Laboratory Collection. SAC 44. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego. https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb2219475z