Research Guides: Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies: Find Sources

Resources

WGSS Databases

Since Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies crosses many disciplines, most research databases will yield results, usually in relation to whatever the database's primary subject. These databases, however, have been specifically selected as best bets for finding relevant content.

Article Databases

Women's Studies International
Index to over 871,000 records drawn from a variety of essential women's studies databases, including Women Studies Abstracts, Women's Studies Database, Women Studies Librarian, Popline Subset on Women, Women of Color and Southern Women, and Women's Health and Development.
Gale OneFile: Contemporary Women's Issues
Gale OneFile: Contemporary Women's Issues offers comprehensive coverage of issues that influence women's lives across the globe. Users will find timely and historically relevant content on topics including civil rights, health, education, professional development, and entrepreneurship.
Gale OneFile: Diversity Studies
This collection explores cultural differences, contributions and influences in the global community. It includes more than 2.7 million articles from 150 journals, updated daily.
Gale OneFile: Gender Studies
This database offers access to scholarly journals and magazines covering topics including gender studies, family and marital issues, and more.
Academic Search Complete
Academic Search Complete is a general academic index that indexes more than 8,200 magazines and journals from every academic discipline and provides the full-text of more than 4,600.

In addition, Academic Search Complete offers access to more than 75,000 videos from the Associated Press. Videos relevant to the search terms will appear in a carousel in the result list.
ABI/Inform Collection
An all-purpose, vast business database with thousands of full-text academic journals and mainstream publications, dissertations, and working papers, including sources like The Economist, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal.
Scopus
Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed research literature. With over 19,000 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers, Scopus supports research needs in the scientific, technical, medical, social sciences, and the arts and humanities.

Primary Research / Archives Databases

Accessible Archives
This resource includes many primary resource collections including Godey's Lady's Book, History of Woman Suffrage, The Lily, and Women's Suffrage collection.
Archives Unbound
Archives Unbound presents topically-focused digital collections of historical documents that support the research and study needs of scholars and students at the university level. Collections relating to WGSS include:

International Women's Periodicals, 1786-1933: Social and Political Issues
Women's Issues and Their Advocacy Within the White House, 1974-1977
Gender Identity and Social Change
Essential primary sources documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations from the nineteenth century to the present. This expansive collection offers sources for the study of women's suffrage, the feminist movement, the men’s movement, employment, education, the body, the family, and government and politics.
LGBTQ History & Culture
Provides the essential primary sources necessary for researchers, students, and educators to delve deeper into gay rights movements, and to explore the social, political, health, and legal issues impacting LGBTQ communities around the world.

Coverage 1946-2000s
Women in The National Archives
Original documents on the Suffrage Question in Britain, the Empire and Colonial Territories combined with a Finding Aid to Women's Studies Resources in The National Archives, Kew, Britain.
Women's Magazine Archive
Full back-files of leading women’s interest consumer magazines. Titles are scanned from cover to cover in high-resolution color and feature detailed article-level indexing.

Coverage: late-19th century through to 2005
Women's Studies Archive
Focuses on the social, political, and professional achievements of women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century., including: the History of Feminist Theory and Activism; domestic culture; lay and ordained church women; women in industry; women's sexuality and gender expression; women’s education; women’s movement; women’s health and mental health; women and law; women and the control of their bodies; and women’s roles and interactions within society.

Includes the following collections:
Issues and Identities
Voice and Vision
Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922
Female Forerunners Worldwide
Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires since 1820
Explores prominent themes in world history since 1820 as told through women’s voices: conquest, colonization, settlement, resistance, and post-coloniality.
Women and Social Movements in the U.S. 1600-2000
Books, letters, images, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, all of which document the multiplicity of American womens reform activities from the colonial period into the 20th century. Primary document projects cover a broad range of topics; books, pamphlets, and related materials provide scholars with in-depth access to the published histories and records of womens reform organizations throughout the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries; there is also a extensive Dictionary of Social Movements, and a Chronology of Women's History.

Other Relevant Databases

The following subject-focused or general databases are also useful for research in WGSS:

America: History and Life Index of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. Covers over 2,000 journals published worldwide. Strong English-language journal coverage is balanced by an international perspective on topics and events, including abstracts in English of articles published in more than 40 languages.
Family and Society Studies Worldwide anthology of four database files, providing access to more than 1.3 million records spanning from 1970 to the present. This resource indexes publications from a wide range of social science disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, demography, health sciences, education, economics, law, history and social work.
Historical Abstracts Abstracts of selected journal articles, citations of books, book reviews and dissertations on the history of all parts of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to present.
Humanities International Complete Humanities International Complete is an essential collection for comprehensive coverage of the humanities with full text content.
JSTOR Full-text digital archive of over 2600 scholarly journals, especially strong in Social Sciences, Humanities, Economics, and Mathematics.
News, Policy & Politics Magazine Archive (feat. Newsweek)
Note: Due to the rarity of some of the original print volumes, there are small gaps (issues or pages) in the runs of some publications.
Project Muse Project MUSE is a unique collaboration between libraries and publishers providing 100% full-text and user-friendly online access to high quality humanities, arts, and social sciences journals from scholarly publishers.
Proquest Research Library This database provides one-stop access to more than 4,000 periodicals from one of the broadest, most inclusive general reference databases ProQuest has to offer. Search from a highly-respected, diversified mix of scholarly journals, trade publications and magazines covering over 150 academic disciplines.
Social Sciences Full Text Social Sciences Full Text provides access to a wide assortment of the most important English-language journals published in the U.S. and elsewhere with full text and page images from scores of key publications, plus abstracting and indexing of hundreds of others.
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts Provides citations, abstracts, and indexing of the international serials literature in political science and its complementary fields, including international relations, law, and public administration / policy. The database is building on the merged backfiles of Political Science Abstracts, 1975-2000, and ABC POL SCI, 1984-2000. Thesaurus of over 3,000 terms used to index records also available.

Below are links to selected key WGSS journals. If you need online access to other years, issues, or titles, email Heather, or search by journal title using the online journal search..

Purdue Archives (4th Floor, HSSE Library)

Susan Bulkeley Butler Women's Archives
The Susan Bulkeley Butler Women’s Archives was established in 2006 as a means of documenting the pioneering women who helped shape Purdue and Indiana history. The Purdue Archives and Special Collections unit actively acquires the papers of women affiliated with Purdue or Indiana. Of special interest are the papers of women who have succeeded in largely male-dominated professions such as engineering, technology, science, and management. The Women’s Archives enables researchers and the Purdue community to rediscover the contributions of women by highlighting their achievements throughout history.

Online Collections

Discovering American Women's History Online
Includes primary sources that document the history of women in the United States.
Women's Suffrage Collection
This collection covers much of that eighty years and includes newspapers that had some overlap between the temperance and women’s rights movements, as well as an anti-suffrage paper.
Women Working, 1870-1930
Provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard's library and museum collections.
The Gay Peoples Union Collection
The Gay Peoples Union Collection presents digital copies of primary source materials documenting GPU and Milwaukee’s gay liberation movement. Materials were selected from the following collections held by the Division of Archives and Special Collections of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries: the Gay Peoples Union Records, GPU News, and the Eldon Murray Papers.
GLBT Historical Society Archives
The archives of the GLBT Historical Society contain approximately 800 collections of personal papers, photographs, audiovisual recordings, and organizational records. These collections include unpublished material such as letters, diaries and scrapbooks documenting the lives of both average people and community leaders. They also include the records of many community organizations, businesses and political campaigns.
The Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America (GLAMA)
The Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America (GLAMA) is made up of collections located in the LaBudde Special Collections Department at the Miller Nichols Library at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The mission of GLAMA is to collect, preserve, and make accessible the materials that reflect the histories of the LGBT communities of the Kansas City region.
Digital Transgender Archive
The purpose of the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is to increase the accessibility of transgender history by providing an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world. Based in Boston, Massachusetts at Northeastern University, the DTA is an international collaboration among more than sixty colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, public libraries, and private collections. By digitally localizing a wide range of trans-related materials, the DTA expands access to trans history for academics and independent researchers alike in order to foster education and dialog concerning trans history.

The DTA uses the term transgender to refer to a broad and inclusive range of non-normative gender practices. We treat transgender as a practice rather than an identity category in order to bring together a trans-historical and trans-cultural collection of materials related to trans-ing gender. We collect materials from anywhere in the world with a focus on materials created before the year 2000.

Everyday Life & Women in America
A resource for the study of American social, cultural and popular history, providing access to thousands of fully searchable images of monographs, pamphlets, periodicals and broadsides addressing 19th and early 20th century political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, employment, marriage, sexuality, home and family life, health, and pastimes. The collection 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 emphasizing contrasts in regional, urban and rural cultures.

Coverage: 1800-1920

Search Google Scholar

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