A&M-SA Research Guides: Women's Studies Research Guide: Primary Sources

Discovering American Women's History Online

This database provides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States. These diverse collections range from Ancestral Pueblo pottery to interviews with women engineers from the 1970s.

The database offers the following features:

Detailed descriptions and links to more than 600 digital collections
Quick access to basic and advanced searches on every page
Options for browsing by subject (300+ entries), place, time period, and primary source type
Options for narrowing search results by subject, time period, place, and primary source type
RSS feeds (at right) alert users to new records in the database.

Discovering American Women's History Online

Selected Digitized Collections

Library of Congress, Digital Collections: Women's History
Four digital collections from the Library of Congress that focus on women's history.

Women's Magazine Archive (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
An archival research resource comprising the backfiles of leading women's interest consumer magazines. Issues are scanned in high-resolution color and feature detailed article-level indexing. Coverage ranges from the late-19th century through to 2005 and these key primary sources permit the examination of the events, trends, and attitudes of this period. Among the research fields served by this material are gender studies, social history, economics/marketing, media, fashion, politics, and popular culture.

Women Working, 1800-1930
Women Working is a digital exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. Working conditions, workplace regulations, home life, costs of living, commerce, recreation, health and hygiene, and social issues are among the issues documented in this online research collection from Harvard University. Collection contains magazines, photographs, diaries, trade publications and pamphlets related to this topic.
All-American Girls Professional Baseball League
The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was started by Philip Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs, during World War II to fill the void left by the departure of most of the best male baseball players for military service. Players were recruited from across the country, and the league was successful enough to be able to continue on after the war. The league had teams based in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, and operated between 1943 and 1954. The 1954 season ended with only the Fort Wayne, South Bend, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, and Rockford teams remaining. The League gave over 600 women athletes the opportunity to play professional baseball. Many of the players went on to successful careers, and the league itself provided an important precedent for later efforts to promote women's sports.
Catt Collection of Suffrage Photographs
The six photograph albums in the Catt Collection...contain approximately 815 photographs and a very limited amount of printed matter, mostly newspaper clippings, related to the history of international woman's suffrage. The photographs cover the period from circa 1840 to circa 1940, with the majority dating from the last years of the Nineteenth Century through the first two decades of the Twentieth Century.
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.
Emory Women Writers Resource Project
The site is divided into collections: Genre Fiction, including the 250 novels; Early Modern literature through the 18th century; Early 20th century literature; World War I poetry; Native American texts; Abolition, Freedom, and Rights; and Women's Advocacy texts. Some texts appear in more than one collection.

The texts may be accessed by searching or browsing. In the browse view the default listing is by author, but using the links below the title of the work, users may view texts by title, ethnicity of the author, geographic location of the author, subject, publisher, or genre. In addition, where spine images are available, books may be viewed as on a bookshelf. Clicking the spine will take the user to the table of contents.
Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Oral History Collection
These taped interviews, which continue to be conducted, describe participants' efforts to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in the state of Georgia and relate to their participation in religious, political, and other organizations involved. Some interviews have been conducted with national figures and others on topics related to Georgia ERA ratification efforts. Biographical and other background information is also provided.
Iowa Women's Archives Digital Collections
A selection of digitized photographs, diaries, scrapbooks, correspondence, oral history interviews, and other artifacts from the Iowa Women’s Archives, documenting the lives of women politicians, activists, writers, homemakers, students, and many others.
The Victorian Women Writers Project
The Victorian Women Writers Project (VWWP) began in 1995 at Indiana University and is primarily concerned with the exposure of lesser-known British women writers of the 19th Century. The collection represents an array of genres - poetry, novels, children's books, political pamphlets, religious tracts, histories, and more. VWWP contains scores of authors, both prolific and rare.
Women in Aviation Digital Collection (Texas Woman's University)
Browse images, collection descriptions, documents, and artifacts pertaining to women civilian and military pilots. Also includes the official records of several women pilot organizations.
Women of the Oklahoma Legislature Oral History Project
As of February 2009, 46 of these remarkable women have shared their stories as part of the Women of the Oklahoma Legislature Oral History Project. Gathering oral histories provides opportunity to pursue answers to questions left silent in what little archival materials exist for these women. Taken individually, these interviews reflect the careers and interests of the legislators; taken collectively they constitute a narrative of the role of women in the Oklahoma Legislature over time.

American History, 1493-1945 (Adam Matthew) This link opens in a new window
This two-part collection provides primary and secondary sources on American history from early settlers through the end of World War II through correspondence, diaries, government documents, photographs, newspapers, broadsides, artwork, and more.

Note: When trying to access this resource, you may encounter a warning "Your connection is not private". Simply click the "Advanced" button at the bottom left of that page, then click "Proceed to americanhistory.amdigital.co.uk (unsafe)" to access this resource. You are seeing this warning because this resource currently does not use Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).
LGBTQ+ Rights (HeinOnline) This link opens in a new window
HeinOnline's LGBTQ+ Rights database charts the gay rights movement in America, showing the civil rights codified into law in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as the inequalities that still exist today. All titles in this collection have been assigned one or more title-level subjects relating to their scope, and are further divided into six subcollections, whose areas of focus constitute Marriage and Family, Employment Discrimination, Military Service, AIDS and Health Care, and Public Spaces and Accommodations, and Historical Attitudes and Analysis.

This collection is rounded out by a curated list of Scholarly Articles selected by Hein editors, as well as a Bibliography of titles to launch your research outside of HeinOnline. Finally, an interactive timeline, incorporating documents from HeinOnline with other media from around the internet, plots out an overview of LGBTQ rights in America from 1950 to the present day, helping to demonstrate the relevancy of the content within the database to the real-world events to which they are connected.
Independent Voices (JSTOR) This link opens in a new window
Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.

Primary versus Secondary

Primary Sources

Primary sources are records of events as they are first described, usually by witnesses or people who were involved in the event. Many primary sources were created at the time of the event but can also include memoirs, oral interviews, or accounts that were recorded later.

Visual materials, such as photos, original artwork, posters, and films are important primary sources, not only for the factual information they contain, but also for the insight they may provide into how people view their world. Primary sources may also include sets of data, such as census statistics, which have been tabulated but not interpreted. However, in the sciences or social sciences, primary sources report the results of an experiment.

Why are primary sources important?

Primary sources serve as the raw material to interpret the past, and when they are used along with previous interpretations by historians, they provide the resources necessary for historical research.

Primary vs. Secondary Sources

Secondary sources offer an analysis or a restatement of primary sources. They often attempt to describe or explain primary sources. Some secondary sources not only analyze primary sources, but also use them to argue a contention or persuade the reader to hold a certain opinion. Examples of secondary sources include dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, books, and articles.