With its archival material, dating back to 1970 in some cases, GenderWatch is a repository of important historical perspectives on the evolution of the women's movement, men's studies, the transgendered community and the changes in gender roles over the years. Publications include scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, regional publications, books and NGO, government and special reports. GenderWatch supports gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) studies; family studies; gender studies, and women's studies with a unique interdisciplinary approach. Combining hundreds of academic, gray, and popular literature titles, GenderWatch provides researchers with hundreds of thousands of articles on wide-ranging topics like sexuality, religion, societal roles, feminism, masculinity, eating disorders, day care, and the workplace.
"Defining Gender provides access to a vast body of original British source material to enrich the teaching and research experience of those studying history, literature, sociology and education from a gendered perspective.
Students and scholars are provided the opportunity to research the ideals of social conduct, power distribution within the family, consumption and leisure, education of men and women and gendered perceptions of the body to analyse and challenge the changing views and ideas surrounding traditional gender roles."
"Highlights:
- Material for the study and analysis of gender, leisure and consumer culture; one of the most vibrant areas of social, cultural and intellectual research, transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries
- The broad range of thematically organised documents provides an excellent opportunity for comparative study and research
- Manuscripts, printed works and illustrations combined to address the key issues from both masculine and feminine perspectives
Key Features:
- Five centuries of (British) advice literature organised into five broad sections.
- A wide range of original primary sources including ephemera, pamphlets, commonplace books, diaries, periodicals, letters, ledgers, manuscript journals, poetry, receipt books and conduct and advice literature.
- Interactive chronology contextualising the documents.
- Essays by leading scholars from Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA."
- History & Geography
- Fine Arts
- Social Sciences
- Literature & Language
- Religion & Philosophy
- Law
- General Reference
- Medicine, Science & Technology
"Everyday Life and Women in America, c.1800-1920 comprises thousands of fully searchable images of rare books, pamphlets, periodicals and broadsides addressing political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, employment, marriage, sexuality, home and family life, health, and pastimes.
Material is especially rich in conduct of life and domestic management literature, offering vivid insights into the daily lives of women and men, as well as emphasising contrasts in regional, urban and rural cultures."
"Highlights:
- Fully-searchable access to 75 rare periodicals ranging from Echoes of the South (Florida) and the Household Magazine (North Carolina), to Lucifer the Lightbearer (Chicago), The Heathen Woman's Friend (Boston) and Women's Work (Georgia)
- A full run of Town Topics: The Journal of Society from the New York Public Library, 1887-1923, an essential source of articles and commentary on art, music, literature, society, gossip and scandal
- Strong coverage of prescriptive literature and manuals for domestic management, telling us much about the organisation of the American home
- A rich collection of rare pamphlets
- Hundreds of monographs illuminating all aspects of family life
Key Features:
- Thematic Areas showcasing some of the collection’s highlights
- Introductory guide to Town Topics; the periodical Town Topics chronicled the New York social world during the height of the Gilded Age
- Contextual essays written by leading academics and collection specialists
- An interactive chronology charting key dates in nineteenth and early twentieth century American history
- Subject search directories providing key subjects found within the documents"
"Gender: Identity and Social Change includes primary sources for the study of gender history, women’s suffrage, the feminist movement and the men’s movement. Other key areas represented in the material include: employment and labor, education, government and legislation, the body, domesticity and the family. Explore records from men’s and women’s organisations and pressure groups, detailing twentieth-century lobbying and activism on a wide array of issues to reveal developing gender relations and prevalent challenges."
"This resource is produced in association with the Perdita Project based at the University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University. Their goal was to identify and describe all manner of writing by early modern women from diaries to works of drama.
One of the key attractions of the resource is that it brings together little-known material from widely scattered locations. This resource includes over two hundred and thirty manuscripts from fifteen libraries and archives in the UK and North America.
The manuscripts are remarkably varied in their content including works of poetry, religious writing, autobiographical material, cookery and medical recipes, and accounts. Historians and literary scholars alike will find this an invaluable resource. There are contextual essays from academics working in the field, as well as biographical and bibliographical resources."
"Highlights:
Featured women include:
- Esther Inglis
- Sarah Cowper
- Margaret Cunningham
- Mary Evelyn
- Lucy Hutchinson
- Lady Elizabeth Lowther
- Katherine Philips
Key Features:
- Physical description of each document – including information on layout, binding, foliation and provenance.
- Additional information – including details of the repository that holds the item.
- Item description - containing information such as, names responsible, title, genre within document, folio details, overview, first line, last line, summary and bibliographic reference. Where this item information is available the user is able to jump straight to the relevant portion of the manuscript.
- The advanced search options provided in the searching aid enables users to generate complex searches."
"The Hall-Hoag Collection of Dissenting and Extremist Printed Propaganda from the John Hay Library at Brown University, features extremist literature ranging from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s - the most heated days of the civil rights movement. Publications in this collection represent a cross-section of extremist opinion towards integration and civil rights activism, but it also contains materials on American anti-Semitism, Christian Identity theology, neo-Nazi groups, and white supremacy movements.
The American Radicalism Collection from Michigan State University is a collection of ephemera on radical political groups across a range of extremist and radical movements, including those involved in religion, race, gender, the environment, and equal rights. The materials represent a large variety of viewpoints, from the far-right to the far-left, on political, social, cultural, sexual, and economic issues in the United States from 1970 to the present.
The Searchlight Archive, held at the University of Northampton in the UK, consists of documents from Searchlight Associates, an information service founded in 1962 that aimed to investigate racist and fascist groups in Britain and abroad and publicise their activities by publishing exposes in their Searchlight magazine. The collections consist of various ephemera accumulated as part of their investigations as well as the complete run of Searchlight magazine (1965-present). Most distinctively, the archive also includes the Searchlight Oral Histories Collection, which consists of interviews (available to researchers as both audio files and transcripts) with anti-fascist activists active from 1940s-1990s.
The National Archives at Kew in the UK, is the source archive for digitised secret service and home office documents relating to inter- and post-war British fascist and communist movements. This includes the Security Service: Personal (PF Series) Files series containing selected files from the First and Second World War periods and the inter-war years on suspected spies, renegades, communist sympathisers, right-wing extremists, and other groups in which the British Security Service took an interest, including pacifist and anti-conscription groups. It also contains Home Office papers pertaining to the detention of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, during the Second World War as well as a number of other suspected Nazi sympathisers who were members of far-right groups, such as the Imperial Fascist League, the Nordic League, and the Right Club.
Political Extremism and Radicalism in the Twentieth Century provides an excellent compilation of primary sources for the study of extremism in the twentieth century. It will be valuable to researchers in international and European history, politics, international relations, and government studies, as well as a much wider application to African American studies, gender studies, sociology, psychology, and religious studies."
"The finding aid which makes up a part of Women in The National Archives enables researchers to quickly locate details of documents held at The National Archives, UK relating to women. This finding aid is far more detailed and extensive than anything available elsewhere online and has the benefit of ranging across all of the classes held at the archive.
The original primary source documents cover the campaign for women's suffrage in Britain, 1903-1928 and the granting of women's suffrage in colonial territories, 1930-1962. The addition of four significant HO 45 files on the suffrage question plus an extended chronology further enhance the collection."
"Highlights:
- The campaign for women's suffrage in Britain and the British Empire
- Biographical information on individual suffragettes
- The 'Cat and Mouse' campaign
- Police surveillance
- Prison conditions
- Parliamentary debates and committee reports
Key Features:
- Full-text-searchable English-language materials
- Documents from the UK government's official archive
- Cross-searchable with other Archives Direct titles"
"Source libraries include the Library of Congress, the London School of Economics and Political Science Library, and the Library of the Society of Friends.
A small selection of collections included in the archive include:
- The Journal of the American National Women's Trade Union League
- Papers of Carrie Chapman Catt
- Action Sociale De La Femme Et Le Livre Francaise
- Britannia: Official Organ of the Women's Party
- Suffragist
- Quaker Women’s Diaries: 18th-19th Centuries
- British Birth Control Material at the British Library of Political and Economic Sciences: 1800-1947
- The Diaries of Elizabeth Fry, 1797-1845"