Skip to Main Content
Today's Hours:

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

General Sites

International Center for Research on Women (ICRW)
Collection of 13,000+ books, reports, fact sheets, and policy briefs on international women/gender issues

UN Women (formerly UNIFEM)
UN Women is the UN organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. A global champion for women and girls, UN Women was established to accelerate progress on meeting their needs worldwide.

Primary Sources

Because women's studies is an interdisciplinary field, the exact definition of primary sources may vary depending on the focus of one's research. In women's studies, primary sources are often considered to be the documents that speak directly about women and their own experience of their lives. Such documents may be letters, diaries, autobiographies, contemporaneous media accounts of events, or even statistical reports.

 

Discovering American Women's History Online
Searchable database of primary sources in digitized online collections
 

Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement
Small, eclectic, but rich online collection of digitized original documents from the Duke University Special Collections Library, includes images and text of newsletters, news clippings, personal manifestos, conference papers, and other items generally from the radical feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
 

Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
Companion site to the PBS film produced by Ken Burns and Paul Barnes, includes annotated links to seminal documents of 19th century feminism and to digitized documents in other online collections, plus video and sound clips

Women's History Digital Collections (Library of Congress)
View and search a variety of digital collections related to women's history, including the papers of Clara Barton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony; National American Woman Suffrage Association Records; Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party; and more.

Local Women's Resources

Loisann's Hope House
Loisann’s Hope House is the Fredericksburg region’s oldest and largest family homeless shelter. Ther organization supports four core programs to mitigate homelessness: Emergency Shelter, Rapid Rehousing, Homelessness Helpline, and FredPrevent – Prevention.
 

YMCA
The Rappahannock Area YMCA is dedicated to building healthy, confident, connected and secure children, adults, families and communities. There are dedicated programs through the YMCA with empowering women and families, and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Bibliographies and Periodical Indexes

Annotated Bibliography and Guide to Archival Resources on the History of Jewish Women in America
Produced by Phyllis Homan Weisbard, University of Wisconsin System Women’s Studies Librarian
 

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index
Searchable, annotated index of articles in more than 600 journals, essays in books, and book reviews about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages, compiled by academic librarians and scholars

ViVa: A Bibliography of Women’s History in Historical and Women’s Studies Journals
Citations and some annotations for more than 7,000 articles about women’s and gender history published from 1975 to 2003 in English, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, and selected from 160 international journals, from the ViVa project of the Netherlands'’s International Institute of Social History (Vrouwengeschiedenis in het Vaktijdschrift or Women's History in Professional Journals)

 
In the social sciences and the sciences, scholars use the terms "primary" and "secondary" differently from scholars in the humanities. 
 
Primary research refers to the research conducted by the authors of the original source. The source will describe the authors' methodology, results and conclusions. This might be raw data, letters, research or study, tests, news reports, interviews, or some journal articles.
 
Secondary research describes or analyzes the research done by others. These include news analyses, magazine articles, some journal articles, scholarly books, opinion pieces or editorials. These can be excellent resources that can lead you to additional primary research on your topic.

Citing Your Sources

While writing research papers, you may need to:

 List your sources in bibliographies or works cited, and

♦ Provide either footnotes, endnotes, or parenthetical citations


For more help with citations, check this guide out.

 

Associations, Organizations, News, and Blogs

Feminist Majority Foundation
 

Gender Equality - Inter-parliamentary Union
From the Inter-Parliamentary Union, this site contains statistics about women in national parliaments, women's suffrage worldwide, and links to other regional websites on women's involvement and inclusion in politics throughout the world.
 

National Women's Studies Association (NWSA)
You can also use Simpson Library's Journal Search to find the NWSA's publication Feminist Formations (prior to 2010 it was called NWSA Journal)
 

Women's Studies News Sources
Women's Studies Research Guide from University of Wisconsin
 

Women's Views on News