Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies: Primary material e-resources

Archives of Sexuality and Gender, part I: LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940

The documents in the Archives of Sexuality and Gender: LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940, Part I present important aspects of LGBTQ life in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Historical records of political and social organizations founded by LGBTQ individuals are featured, as well as publications by and for lesbians and gays, and extensive coverage of governmental responses to the AIDS crisis. The archive also contains personal correspondence and interviews with numerous LGBTQ individuals, among others. The archive includes gay and lesbian newspapers from more than 35 countries, reports, policy statements, and other documents related to gay rights and health, including the worldwide impact of AIDS, materials tracing LGBTQ activism in Britain from 1950 through 1980, and more.

British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries 1500-1950 (Alexander Street Press)
'the immediate experiences of approximately 500 women, as revealed in over 90,000 pages of diaries and letters'

Defining Gender, 1450-1910
a thematically organised collection of original primary source material from British archives, which 'explores the study and analysis of gender, leisure and consumer culture'

Epistolae: Medieval Women's Latin Letters
collection of letters to and from women in the Middle Ages, from the 4th to the 13th century; written in Latin, given with English translations and, where available, biographical sketches of the women writing

Feminism in Cuba
digitised archival documents spanning the period from Cuban independence to the end of the Batista regime

Gerritsen Collection--Women's History Online, 1543-1945
a collection of ‘books, pamphlets and periodicals reflecting the revolution of a feminist consciousness and the movement for women's rights’, with ‘more than 4,700 publications from continental Europe, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand, dating from 1543-1945'

International Women's Periodicals, 1786-1833: Social and Political Issues (Archives Unbound)
Provides online access to 7 women’s magazine and journal publications covering the late eighteenth century to the 1930s. The material allows researchers to explore the role of women in society and the development of the public lives of women as the push for women's rights (woman suffrage, fair pay, better working conditions, etc.) grew in the United States and England. The collection contains overwhelmingly English and US publications, with 4 German, 1 French periodical and 1 Icelandic periodical.

Italian Women Writers
Access to an extensive corpus of literature written by Italian women authors. Biographies, portraits, editions are indicated.

Latin American Women Writers
100,000 pages of literary works, along with memoirs and essays, in their original language, by Latin American women from the colonial period in the 17th century to the present

LGBT Magazine Archive
Full text of 26 leading magazine in this field, including The Advocate, Gay News and its successor publication Gay Times.

Literary Manuscripts (Berg)
Victorian manuscripts from the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of The New York Public Library, including collections on the Brontës & Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Middle East Women's Activism
a collection of interviews with 96 women of different generations in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, conducted in 2013-2014 by Nicola Pratt, University of Warwick, and exploring the relationship between gender and geopolitics in the context of the Middle East

Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Women: transnational networks
A wide array of primary source documents—serials, books, manuscripts, diaries, reports, and visuals—focusing on issues at the intersection of gender and class from the late-eighteenth century to the era of suffrage in the early-twentieth century, all through a transnational perspective. 

North American Women's Letters and Diaries
'the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters'

Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers 1500-1700
230 digitised manuscripts from the Perdita Project, written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Soviet Woman Digital Archive (1945-1991)
The Soviet Woman digital archive contains all obtainable published issues from the very first issue, comprising more than 500 issues and over 7,500 articles.

Women and Social Movements, International
This digital archive includes 150,000 pages of conference proceedings, reports of international women's organizations, publications and web pages of women's non-governmental organizations, and letters, diaries, and memoirs of women active internationally since the nineteenth century.

Women in the National Archives
This resource provides access to an online finding aid for women's studies resources in The National Archives, Kew, covering 1559-1995. It also gives access to early 20th century original documents on the Suffrage Question in Britain, the Empire and Colonial Territories.

Women, War and Society, 1914-1918 (Archives unbound)
Documents the essential contribution of women during the Great War as well as the revolutionary and permanent impact the World War I had on the personal, social and professional lives of these women, with primary sources from the Imperial War Museum, London, including charity and international relief reports, pamphlets, photographs, press cuttings and more.

Women Writers Online
a full-text collection of texts by pre-Victorian women writers, published by the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University

(N.B. If you are not connected to the Oxford network you will need to login with your Oxford Single Sign On username and password to gain full access to the above online resources and some of the guides)

Bibliography of English Women Writers 1500-1640
'an open-ended work of scholarship currently listing 738 recovered writers and their texts, canonical and non-canonical'

Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures
reference work reflecting the very latest research on gender studies and the Islamic world

Genesis - Women's history sources in the British Isles
Genesis is a mapping initiative, funded by the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) to identify and develop access to women's history sources in the British Isles. The database holds descriptions of women's history collections from libraries, archives and museums from around the British Isles.

Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles
'provides entries on authors' lives and writing careers, contextual material, timelines, sets of internal links, and bibliographies'

Oxford Guide to British Women Writers
a guide to the enormous range of British women's writing from the medieval period to the present day

Mary Wollstonecraft, by James Heath (1757–1834), engraved from the painting of John Opie (1761–1807) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons