This page identifies digitised collections available on the web.
Some of the websites listed are maintained by the academic community; others focus on archive, library and museum collections. Some of the websites are 'virtual collections', bringing together material on a specific subject area from across the world. A couple of the websites are small selections of primary source material brought together as learning resources.
The Genesis team only lists resources that fulfil 3 criteria:
- Where all or a significant proportion of a collection has been digitised
- Where all or a significant proportion of the resource directly relates to women
- Where the digital resource is freely available (i.e. we do not list resources that require a subscription fee)
British
Alathea Bethell's book of private devotions
Alathea Bethell's book of private devotions in verse and prose; English; 1674-1708, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 2240. A collection of Christian religious texts including psalms, religious texts, prose meditations, prose, poems. Some are from cited authors, others by unknown authors possibly including Alathea herself..
Ann Griffiths 1776-1805
A website dedicated to the study of the life and work of the foremost Welsh female poet and hymn-writer, Ann Griffiths (1776-1805). The website contains an introduction to her life and work, the text of her hymns and letters with English translations, and online access to digitised versions of a wide cross-section of printed and manuscript material relating to Ann Griffiths. The website is edited by Dr E Wyn James of the School of Welsh, Cardiff University, an acknowledged expert on Ann Griffiths and Welsh hymnology.
Beatrice Webb Diaries
The LSE Digitial Library now includes 'Webbs on the Web' a selection of digitised materials on and by Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Beatrice Webb's extensive diaries are a key resource for research into a wide range of subjects, including late 19th and 20th century politics, industrial relations, and the role of women in society and family relationships.
Bath Fashion Museum
The earliest pieces date from around 1600, and it charts the evolution of fashion right up to the modern day.
British Women Romantic Poets 1789-1832
The British Women Romantic Poets Project is a digital initiative of the University of Carolina Library, Davis (USA). The resource consists of E-text editions of poetry by British and Irish women written (not necessarily published) between 1789 (the onset of the French Revolution) and 1832 (the passage of the Reform Act), a period traditionally known in English literary history as the Romantic period. These are fully searchable online.
British Women Playwrights around 1800
British Women Playwrights around 1800 is a website maintained by the University of Montreal. It includes full texts for a selection of plays not readily available. Supporting the plays are a number of resources freely available on the site including chronologies, essays, bibliographies, indexes and teaching resources.
British History Online
British History Online is the digital library of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and early modern history of Britain. To date, the project has digitised and made freely available more than 350 volumes, including such central resources as the Victoria County History of England, and the Journals of the Houses of Commons and Lords. These are fully searchable online. This is a collaborative project between the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, and the History of Parliament Trust. This is a generic resource, but gender specific terms yield useful results, try searches for 'women', 'woman', 'female' 'mother' etc. Searches may be made within specific publications, hence 'Biographical database of medical practitioners in London 1550-1640' can be searched for 'female' yielding over 100 results.
Canada's Early Women Writers
Not strictly a digitised collection, but a useful online database it presents biographical and publication information for more than 470 women who lived in Canada or wrote about Canada, and authored an English-language book or pamphlet of fiction or poetry that was published before 1940. It includes titles of publications and references to archival resources.
Charlotte Mary Yonge letters (1823-1901)
This website contains transcripts of hundreds of letters written by Charlotte Yonge, who was one of the most important and influential of English Victorian writers. Yonge published over 100 books.
A Changing House: the Life Peerages Act 1958
This website marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Life Peerages Act 1958, which allowed the creation of life peers including women, who were thereby allowed to sit in the House of Lords for the first time. It highlights original documents from the Parliamentary Archives and works of art from the Palace of Westminster Collections which illustrate the history and achievements of life peers and women in Parliament. Plase note this is a web archive version of the original website.
Elizabeth Lyttelton's commonplace book
Elizabeth Lyttelton's commonplace book; English, French, and Latin; 1670s-1713, Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 8460. Daughter of Sir Thomas Browne, Elizabeth shared her father's Royalist sympathies and his religious conformity. This miscellany includes extracts from the books she read; poems about and by family members, Norfolk friends, and her father's and brother's associates; popular literature of the later seventeenth century.
Emma Darwin's Diaries 1824-1896
Emma Wedgwood Darwin (1808-1896) was the wife of Charles Darwin. There are sixty small pocket diaries covering the years 1824, 1833-4, 1839-45 and 1848-96; over over 3,200 images. The digitisation has been carried out by Cambridge University Library where the diaries are kept. Emma recorded many events, creating a vivid record of daily life in the Darwin household, such as visits and visitors, dinners and the health of her family including her husband Charles Darwin.
English Heritage: Women's History
The Women's History section of the English Heritage website explores how the historic environment reveals women's history. Using text and photographs of building interiors and exteriors the webpage has several sections including: Buildings that Celebrate Working Women and Women Celebrated by London Blue Plaques. Also launched in 2010 is Visible in Stone which explores the social context of women and the built environment using English heritage, TUC Library and The Women's Library, London Metropolitan University resources.
The Equal Pay Debate
This learning journey will explore the issues surrounding the equal pay debate in the 1940s. It will examine the pamphlet “Equal Work Deserves Equal Pay!” (pictured right), produced by the Equal Pay Campaign Committee. This pamphlet was collected by the pressure group the National Council for Civil Liberties (now known as Liberty)and forms part of its archive. These records are held at the Hull History Centre. This resource can be used for UK National Curriculum: KS3 Citizenship- Human Rights; KS3 History: Twentieth Century; KS4 Citizenship - Human Rights; KS4 History - Twentieth Century GCSE; Citizenship Skills
Feminist Activism - Education & Job Opportunities
This Learning resource focuses on the 1970s women's liberation movement Demand No 2 – Equal Training, Education, and Job Opportunities, and highlights the themes of collective action and persistent struggle. The resource links the Equality legislation of the 1970s with a case study of Leeds’ women’s activism, exploring how a local pioneering venture made use of public funding and institutions to achieve its aims. It uses items from the Feminist Archive North collections
Feminist Posters and Badges: Feminist Archive South
The Feminist Archive South had an online 'Gallery' with over 60 posters and 60 badges used in feminist campaigning and dating from the 1970s-1990s. As at 2011 the archive had moved to Bristol University Special Collections and was awaiting cataloguing. The link takes users to the Women's Issues Web Archive where the gallery is preserved.
Feminist Webs 2009
Feminist Webs 2009 is an online ‘women and girls work space’ that will act as both an archive and a resource for practitioners, volunteers and young women involved in youth and community work with young women. The archive is both a physical resource, held at Manchester University and an online resource. Downloadable resources include audio interviews with older feminist activists, interviewed by young women.
FRAGEN Fragen is the result of a pan-European digitisation project, seeking to make available some of the most relevant, inspirational and influential feminist texts published since the 1960s. The Women's Library was the UK project partner and joined 28 other women's libraries, archives and organisations across Europe. The selected books, articles, pamphlets and posters were chosen in partnership with selected feminist activists and academics and are available to view free of charge.
From History to Her Story Yorkshire Women’s Lives on-line, 1100 to the present
A major and unique project in women's history, examining the role women have played in history through the lives and organisations of Yorkshire women. Includes details about life for women in the 1950s and the scandalous behaviour of nuns in the middle ages. The project provides details of some of the major archival collections, including the diaries of Anne Lister, the medical case records of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, the Bronte letters and the George Henry Wood collection. By 2011 85,000 images created from the archive material of Yorkshire women had been made available on-line and work was in progress to further develop the resource.
Glasgow University Suffrage Materials
An online selection of digitised women's suffrage items giving an overview of the suffrage movement and an overview of items on this topic held in the University of Glasgow Library's Special Collections.
Gertrude Bell Project
An online archive of the Gertrude Bell papers held at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne Library. The collection consists of transcriptions of about 1,600 letters, travel diaries and about 7,000 digitised photographs. A collection description is also available in the Genesis database.
Historical Nursing Journals
The Royal College of Nursing Archives are the most important collections dedicated to the history of the nursing profession in the UK. Their site includes the Historical nursing journals database. This project aims to digitise relevant journals, beginning with The Nursing Record which was published from 1888 to 1956, changing its name in 1902 to The British Journal of Nursing. By 2007 over 100 digitised volumes were available online.
Jewish Mothers and Daughters: a Film Archive
Video interviews with 50 Jewish women who made an impact on life in the UK. There were a range of interviewees including theatre related interviews Janet Suzman, Pamela Howard, Abigail Morris, Miriam Karlin, Maureen Lipman, Susannah Kraft, Julia Pascal. Topics included identity, feminism, relationship with mother, relationship to Great Britain, exile, holocaust, ambition.The interviews were carried out by Pascal Theatre Company in association with the London Jewish Cultural Centre. As well as the online collection, copies of the interviews are also available at the following repositories (some only hold those interviews relating to their area of interest, e.g. theatre) the British Library (NSA), The London Jewish Cultural Centre, The Imperial War Museum (Sound Archive), London Metropolitan Archives, V&A Theatre Collections, St Lawrence University New York.
Manchester Archives on Flickr
As at March 2011 Manchester Archives were adding sets of photographs to Flickr where they are encouraging the public to tag photographs. As at March 2011 sets included Women in the Archives, Women's Suffrage, and LGBT.
Margaret Thatcher Archive
Margaret Thatcher (1925-) was Britains first female Prime Minister for the Conservative party from 1979-1990. The Margaret Thatcher website is run by the Margaret Thatcher Trust and holds biographical information and digital resources of her speeches and papers.
Paper Patterns Collection: London College of Fashion
The London College of Fashion's Paper Patterns collection has accumulated over the years until it numbers some 800 dating from the 1920s to the present day. The collection has been catalogued and digitised and is searchable online.
Podcasts from Oxford University
A growing number of podcasts related to women's history are available on the Oxford Unviersity website, including a number of 'Bodcasts' from the Bodliean Library. There is a search option, so check for related feminine terms such as 'female' or 'girl' as well as 'women'
Queen Coal? Why should we remember Victorian mining women?
This Yorkshire and the North West learning resource, aimed at UK National Curriculum KS3 History consists of four linked sets of historical overviews looking at the changing roles of women in the coal mining industry through four periods: pre-1842, post-war 1940s/1950s and the 1984/85 Miners' Strike. The archive material, from the National Coal Mining Museum for England, is provided to support thematic work on the historical enquiry question: Why should we remember women in the coal mining industry?
Scotland
The National Library of Scotland has digitised women related content as online exhibitions. As at March 2011 the following features were available on their website: Mary, Queen of Scots last letter, Phoebe Anna Traquair, Experiences of War [for Marie Chisholm], Suffragettes, and Muriel Spark
Suffrage Banner Collection: The Women's Library
The Women's Library has over 50 suffrage banners relating to the early twentieth century campaigns for women's suffrage in the United Kingdom. This site allows you to search and view the banners and associated artwork.
BBC Suffragette - voices and stories
In this collection of programmes, we hear from those women whose part in the struggle would finally culminate in the 1919 Representation of the People Act and the election of the first woman MP. This is a BBC archive website with oral histories from suffragettes.
From Suffering to Suffrage
This Yorkshire and the North West learning resource, is aimed at UK National Curriculum KS3 Citizenship - Unit 12. It focuses on the women's suffrage movement and in particular the involvement of women from the Huddersfield area. Material from Huddersfield Local Studies and Archives and Kirklees Museums has been used
TUC History Online
Trade unions have played, and will continue to play, a decisive role in shaping economic and social developments in Britain. This site includes a timeline and digitised images that explore the TUC Library Collection held at London Metropolitan University. The Union makes us strong: includes material on the 'match girls strike' of 1888. A range of images and documents, including a register giving the strikers' details, have been digitised. 'Winning Equal Pay: the value of women's work' includes filmed interviews, digitised images and documents recording the long campaign to achieve equal pay for women in the UK.
Victorian Women Writers Project
This project, hosted by Indiana University, USA, seeks to produce highly accurate transcriptions of works by British women writers of the 19th century. The works include anthologies, novels, political pamphlets, religious tracts, children's books, and volumes of poetry and verse drama. Writers represented include Josephine Butler and Bodichon.
Women at Queen Mary Online: a virtual exhibition
This site explores the history of four colleges - Queen Mary and Westfield Colleges, St Barts and The London Schools of Medicine and Dentistry - and the women who attended them from 1850 to the present day. It presents digital copies of photographs, manuscripts, student magazines and audio recordings.
Women 1900-1950: Museum of London
This section of the Museum of London site explores women's history. It includes digitised images of objects from their collections, including suffrage memorabilia.
Yorkshire Women's Lives Online: From History to Her Story from 1100 to present
A collection of 85,000 digitised documents and images relating to women from West Yorkshire and Hull. The collection illustrates how women have contributed to history and life in Yorkshire from the middle ages to present. There are four main areas -Women in history, featured archives, learning materials and a gallery. Women in history has 15 themes ranging from politics to prostitution, textiles to travel, communities to campaigning, education, leisure and music. Each has details of an individuals life, role or organisation. Featured archives includes Women of the century, Anne Lister, West Riding Pauper lunatic asylum, The Brontes and George Henry Wood. Learning materials has two features - Life in a lunatic asylum and Women and War.
International
African-American Women Writers of the nineteenth century
Digital resource of The Schomburg Center, part of The New York Public Library. It consists of 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. These include books and pamphlets published prior to 1920. A full text searchable database, subjects written about include family, religion, and slavery. There are additional research resources presented alongside the database.
African-American Women On-line Archives
Digital resource of archives held at Duke University, Special Collections Library, Durham, North Carolina, USA. This includes the archives of Elizabeth Johnson Harris, and the slave letters of Vilet Lester, Hannah Valentine and Lethe Jackson.
Agents of Social Change
Part of the The Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, Massachusetts, USA, this resource highlights material from eight collections of 20th century women activists: the papers of Constance Baker Motley, Dorothy Kenyon, Mary Kaufman, Frances Fox Piven, Jessie Lloyd O'Connor, and Gloria Steinem and the records of the Women's Action Alliance and the National Congress of Neighborhood Women. These new resources highlight women's part in the multiple struggles for social change that span the century including labor, socialism, civil liberties, peace, racial justice, urban reform, welfare rights, and women's rights. They illuminate connections between reform movements, as well as the interplay of race, ethnicity, class, and gender within them.
Austrian Historic Women's Journals
This is part of a digitisation project of the Austrian National Library, allowing for full text searching of digitised journals. As at 2011 this project was still in development
Celebration of Women Writers
The University of Pennsylvania's Digital Library Initiative provides IT support for this volunteer project, as part of its 'Online Books' work. The project also links to other digitised library sites such as Project Gutenberg. The contents can be browsed by an A-Z of the author's name or by the century a text was written, also by the author's country or ethnicity. Essays and contextual information are also available.
Chicago Women's Liberation Union Herstory Website
The Chicago Women's Liberation Union (CWLU) grew out of the women's movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and the other social movements of the time.The CWLU Herstory Website Project was organized to archive and share the history of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union. It includes a series of Galleries with digitised photographs, posters, badges ('buttons'), music, and publications available to browse online. It appears to be a 'vrtual' collection rather than being attached to a specific repository.
Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement
The materials in this on-line archival collection document various aspects of the Women's Liberation Movement in the United States, and focus specifically on the radical origins of this movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Items range from radical theoretical writings to humourous plays to the minutes of an actual grassroots group. The items in this on-line collection are scanned and transcribed from original documents held in the Special Collections Library, Duke University (USA). Subject categories include: general and theoretical; medical and reproductive rights; music; organizations and activism; sexuality and lesbian feminism; socialist feminism; women of color; women's work and roles
Early Modern French Women Writers
This project is based at Wilson Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA. The project focuses on important women writers irrespective of genre c. 1400-1700. Writers include Christine de Pizan, Diane de Poitiers, Louise Labé, Madeleine de Scudéry, Marguerite de Navarre, Marie de Gournay, and Pernette du Guillet.
The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project
This project is based at the George Washington University, Washington DC, USA. The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers is a project dedicated to providing access to Eleanor Roosevelt's writings, radio and television appearances. Projects include: Creating scholarly, annotated, and multi-media editions of The Selected Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt: The Human Rights Years, to be published by Charles Scribner's Sons in both print and electronic format beginning in 2006; Mounting a comprehensive, electronic edition of Eleanor Roosevelt's 8,000 'My Day' columns, available free to anyone with Internet access.
Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony
Susan B Anthony (1820-1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) led the movement for women's rights in the nineteenth century. The documents in this mini-edition focus on the first decade of their collaboration, from 1852 until 1861, when they honed their skills as reformers in New York State. These primary historical sources are pertinent to the study of women, American politics, New York State, and antebellum reform movements.
Harriet Jacobs: Selected Writings and Correspondence
This is a online exhibition and selection of documents related to the fugitive slave author, Harriet Jacobs, and the work of Jean Fagan Yellin to authenticate the slave narrative that Jacobs wrote. There is a related Harriet Jacobs Papers site.
HEARTH, Mann Library, Cornell University
HEARTH (Home Economics Archive, Research, Tradition, History) is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. The full text of these materials, as well as bibliographies and essays on the wide array of subjects relating to Home Economics, are all freely accessible on the site.
Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, America
The Jewish Women's Archive, USA, has put this exhibition online with selected items from their collections and interviews with American Jewish women.
Margaret Sanger Papers Project, New York University
The Margaret Sanger Papers Project is a historical editing project sponsored by the Department of History at New York University. The Project was formed in 1985 to locate, arrange, edit, research, and publish the papers of the noted birth control pioneer.
Monastic matrix
Based at Yale University, USA this is a scholarly resource for the study of women's religious communities from 400 to 1600. It includes primary and secondary sources, including a dataset of searchable texts and an image library.
National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921
'Votes for Women' gives a selection of items from the NAWSA Collection, and consists of 167 books, pamphlets and other artifacts documenting the suffrage campaign. They are a subset of the Library's larger collection donated by Carrie Chapman Catt, longtime president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, in November of 1938. The collection includes works from the libraries of other members and officers of the organization including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B Anthony, Lucy Stone, Alice Stone Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Smith Miller, Mary A Livermore.
The National Archives (USA) Catalogue
The National Archives (USA) Catalogue includes digital images. To search for images use a woman-related search term (such as 'women' or 'suffrage') and tick the option to refine the search to Descriptions of Archival Materials linked to digital copies. There are a large number of related images, particularly posters and photographs related to suffrage, the world wars, and work
Nineteenth Century U.S. Women's Writings
The Online Archive of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writings, supported by the Bucknell University, Department of English, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, is a collection of new scholarly editions of nineteenth-century USA women's writings and resources for continued research about them. Some of the primary texts reproduced here are well-known classics, while others have been out of print since their original publication in the 19th century. These include the abolitionist writings of Lydia Maria Child.
Olive Schreiner Letters Project
This site contains letters and publications about Olive Schreiner. The project will transcribe, analyse and publish the complete extant letters written by Schreiner (1855-1920), one of the key feminist writers and social theorists. Through this, it will contribute theoretically and methodologically to the use of letters and other epistolary materials in social science and humanities research.
Phillis Wheatley
Part of the website African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts. This resource includes commentary on Phillis Wheatley as well as digitised images of poems and letters by Wheatley.
Sophia Smith Digital Collections
This site contains a selection of online exhfibitions taken from the Sophia Smith Collections (American). It covers photographs, papers, publications, letters and oral history. Themes include second wave feminism, lesbianism, letters and publications about Olive Schreiner.
Swedish Women's Struggle for Suffrage
This site relates to the struggle that was organised by Landsföreningen för kvinnans politiska rösträtt ('The National Association for Women's Franchise'). The information is supported by newly written texts, old documents, photographs and other material. The contemporary material dates c.1884-1919.
The History of Women at the University of Wisconsin
History of Women's Education at the University - full text of the seven books is available online
Women and Social Movements website
The Women and Social Movements website is primarily a subscription website, jointly published by the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at SUNY Binghamton and Alexander Street Press. however this link includes some themes and lesson plans for teachers which include a selected number of freely available original sources. oth sites are aimed at teachers of American history.
Women Physicians
This site includes a selection from the archives of correspondence, scrapbooks, clippings, college records, images, diaries, publications and ephemera documenting the history of women physicians beginning with the first medical school for women, Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP). There are also additional resource pages illustrating particular themes.
Women Working, 1800 - 1930
Focusing on women's role in the United States economy, this resource provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections. The collection features approximately 500,000 digitized pages and images including 7,500 pages of manuscripts, 3,500 books and pamphlets and 1,200 photographs. Baker Library's collections are strongly represented in Trade Catalogs, Photographs and Books, Serials and Pamphlets.
Women's Travel Writing 1830-1930
This project is based at Wilson Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA. The project will emphasize women travellers from and to the United States and include selected European women travellers to non-Western areas. AS well as the texts there are some images and suppoerting resources. Please note: some of the texts are password restricted.