Research Guides: Gender Studies: 19th Century

19th Century Women and Gender Studies Sources

The following resources are major tools for finding digitized texts related to the history of women and gender.

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
A collection of books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women's reform activities.
Women and Social Movements, International — 1840 to Present
Contains primary source writing by women activists, including personal letters and diaries, and the proceedings of conferences at which pivotal decisions were made.
Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires Since 1820
Online archive of documents that views the history of modern empires through women’s eyes, with an emphasis on the voices of the colonized. Includes documents related to the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and United States Empires, and settler societies in the United States, New Zealand and Australia.
Archives of Sexuality and Gender (Gale Primary Sources)
Digitized primary sources on social, political, health, and legal issues concerning gender and sexuality, and impacting LGBTQ communities around the world. Includes newsletters and newspapers, government documents, manuscripts, pamphlets, and more. Contributing repositories include: Kinsey Institute, British Library, Lesbian Herstory, Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, National Library of Medicine, and more. UCLA provides access to Parts I and II (LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940), Part III (Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century), Part IV (International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture), and Part VI (Community and Identity in North America).
Gender: Identity and Social Change
Primary sources documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations from the nineteenth century to the present. Includes 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.
Age of Exploration
Includes five centuries of journeys across the globe, scientific discoveries, the expansion of European colonialism, conflict over territories and trade routes, and decades-long search and rescue attempts in this multi-archive collection dedicated to the history of exploration. Collection also includes images, video, and audio.
Archives Unbound (Gale Primary Sources)
Archives Unbound includes primary source content with broad topic clusters including: African American studies; American Indian studies; Asian studies; British history; Holocaust studies; LGBT studies; Latin American and Caribbean studies; Middle East studies; political science; religious studies; and women’s studies.
African American Communities
Explore late 19th-20th century African American communities in different cities through pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, reports, and oral histories.
The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
Firsthand descriptions of historical characters and events, glimpses of daily life in the army, anecdotes about key events and personages, accounts of sufferings at home, and thousands of other experiences. Includes published memoirs, letters and diaries from individuals, and biographies.
American Indian Experience
A full-text digital collection exploring the histories and contemporary cultures of the indigenous peoples of the United States. Contains more than 150 volumes of scholarship and reference content, hundreds of primary documents, and thousands of images from pre-contact to the present day.
native American, native americans, american mosaic, american mosaics

Library of Congress Digital Collections
Online access to manuscripts, ephemera, images, maps, and more. Includes several sets of materials related to the suffrage movement.

American Periodicals
Published between 1741 and 1900, these periodicals include special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children and women magazines, and many other historically significant periodicals.
Archives of Latin American and Caribbean History, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century
Over 1.3 million pages of archival material (manuscripts, monographs, newspapers and periodicals) concerning Latin America and the Caribbean, including major collections about Latin American independence, Brazilian popular groups, Diplomatic activities in Cuba and more. Under this database's former name, Gale World Scholar: Latin America and the Caribbean included some periodicals and reference books that have been moved to Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography and Gale eBooks.
Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection: Series 1
Content pertaining to US Hispanic history, literature, and culture from colonial times to 1960. Includes historical articles, books, broadsides, newspapers and pamphlets in both Spanish and English.
Black Thought and Culture
Full text collection of non-fiction published prose and oratory by leading African Americans. Writing is focused on research in black studies, political science, American history, music, literature, and art.
British Periodicals
Facsimile page images and searchable full text for nearly 500 British periodicals published from the 17th through the early 20th centuries.
Defining Gender, 1450-1910
Contains primary source material from British and European archives, and includes four thematic areas: Conduct and Politeness, Domesticity and the Family, Consumption and Leisure, Education and Sensibility, and The Body.

Discovering American Women's History Online
Brings together hundreds of primary source digital collections covering U.S. women’s history.
Dovie Horvitz Collection
The Dovie Horvitz Collection consists of over 1,300 images and scanned texts representing objects and printed matter that reflect the lives of women from the mid 1800s through the mid 1900s.

Early Experiences in Australasia: Primary Sources and Personal Narratives 1788-1901
Contains first-person accounts, including letters and diaries, narratives, and other primary source materials.

Empire Online
Primary source manuscripts and secondary essays relevant to Empire Studies. The sections cover Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969; Empire Writing and the Literature of Empire; The Visible Empire; Religion and Empire; and Race, Class and Colonialism, 1783-1969.
Everyday Life & Women in America, c1800-1920
Thousands of fully searchable images (alongside transcriptions) of books, pamphlets, periodicals and broadsides addressing 19th and early 20th century political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, marriage, and more.

Feminism in Cuba: Nineteenth through Twentieth Century Archival Documents (Archives Unbound)
This collection, compiled from Cuban sources, spans the period from Cuban independence to the end of the Batista regime (1898-1958). The collection sheds light on Cuban feminism, women in politics, literature by Cuban women and the legal status of Cuban women.

This collection comprises, in its entirety, the Scholarly Resources microfilm collection entitled The Women's Movement in Cuba, 1898-1958: The Stoner Collection on Cuban Feminism.
Food and Drink in History
From feast to famine, explore five centuries of primary source material documenting the story of food and drink throughout history. The materials in this collection illustrate the deep links between food and identity, politics and power, gender, race and socio-economic status, as well as charting key issues around agriculture, nutrition and food production.
Frontier life: Borderlands, Settlements, and Colonial Encounters
Primary sources from multiple archives that capture the lives, experiences and colonial encounters of people living at the edges of the Anglophone world from 1650-1920. Includes the various colonial frontiers of North America, as well as the settlers of Southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
Gale Primary Sources
A cross-search platform of 21 databases available from the Gale Group, including historical newspapers (formerly NewsVault), The Making of Modern Law, U.S. Declassified Documents Online, among others. They can be searched as a group or as a selected subset.
Gerritsen Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs (Women's History)
Facsimile scans of monographs, periodicals, and pamphlets in 15 languages, started in the late 1800s by Dutch physician Aletta Jacobs and her husband C.V. Gerritsen. Focus is on 19th and 20th century feminist consciousness and the movement for women's rights but includes books published from 1543 to 1945.
The Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Explores America's transformative age of industrialization, expanding wealth, inequality, and social change through personal collections, business records, and visual content. Most material ranges from 1870-1920, with some personal collections continuing later in the twentieth century. Includes papers of key industrial corporations, charities, influential families, and cultural institutions to visual content in the form of political cartoons, photographs, and ephemera.

Godey's Lady's Book (via Accessible Archives, 1830-1898)
Major historical women's magazine, covering fashion descriptions and plates, biographical sketches, handcrafts, female costume, the dance, equestrienne procedures, health and hygiene, recipes and remedies, and more.
HEARTH: Home Economics Archive
HEARTH is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines.

History of Mass Tourism
Guidebooks, brochures, periodicals, travel agency correspondence, photographs, and personal travel journals provide insight into the expansion of tourism for the masses between 1850 and 1980.
History Vault
UC-wide pilot (renewed through June 30, 2025) with access to selected History Vault modules, including content derived from primary source digitized microfilm that is cross-searchable. Modules include Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle; Southern Life, Slavery, and the Civil War; American Indians and the American West; American Politics and Society; International Relations and Military Conflicts; Women's Studies; Workers, Labor Unions, and Radicals; Latinx History; Revolutionary War and Early America; and more.

Human Rights Documentation Initiative
From the U. of Texas, this site makes available archived web resources related to human rights organizations and issues.

International Women’s Periodicals, 1786-1933: Social and Political Issues (Archives Unbound)
Historical women’s periodicals in the lives of women, the role of women in society and, in particular, the development of the public lives of women as the push for women’s rights—woman suffrage, fair pay, better working conditions.
Jewish Life in America, c1654-1954
Contains digitized manuscript materials covering the history of Jewish communities in America through the mid-20th century. Includes letters, scrapbooks, autobiographies, notebooks and more.
Latin American Women Writers
A collection of full text literature and non-fiction by Latin American women from the 17th century colonial period to the present. Includes prose, poetry, and drama composed by women writing in Mexico, Central America, and South America. Also included are essays by Latin American feminists and revolutionaries, who address both the universal concerns of women in every age and the distinctive issues of their struggles in the region.
London Low Life
Contains primary source materials on Victorian street culture, including ephemera, penny fiction, cartoons, chapbooks, reform literature, and guides to prostitution.
Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926 (Gale Primary Sources)
Full-text collection of 19th and early 20th century Anglo-American legal treatises, derived from two essential reference collections for historical legal studies: the 19th Century Legal Treatises and 20th Century Legal Treatises microfilm collections.
MOML; legal history; British Commonwealth law; history; Anglo-American law; politics
Migration to New Worlds
Primary sources from 1800 to 1924 concerning migration from Europe and Asia to the Americas and Australasia. Includes both first-person accounts such as letters, travel journals, diaries, and oral histories; and supplementary materials such as scrapbooks, government papers, maps, emigration pamphlets, and ship plans.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online (Gale Primary Sources)
Primary source collections of the 19th century. UCLA access includes: Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange; British Politics and Society; British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture; Children's Literature and Childhood; Europe and Africa: Commerce, Christianity, and Conquest; European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection; Mapping the World: Maps and Travel Literature; Photography: The World Through the Lens; Religion, Society, Spirituality, and Reform; Science, Technology, and Medicine: 1780-1925; and Women: Transnational Networks.
Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals (Gale Primary Sources)
Covers periodicals representing nineteenth-century journalism, sourced from the British Library, the National Library of Scotland and other specialist libraries, UCLA subscribes to Series 1 on New Readerships and Series 2 on Empire.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries: Colonial to 1950
Collection of letters and diaries of women of varied age groups, ethnicities, and geographical regions, spanning more than 300 years. Includes both published and previously unpublished materials.

Project Diana: An Online Human Rights Archive
An international archive of human rights legal documentation, provided by Yale Law School.

Popular Medicine in America, 1800-1900
Digitized primary source materials originally aimed at the general public rather than medical professionals. Includes rare books, pamphlets, trade cards, and advertising ephemera.
Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive (Gale Primary Sources)
Searchable books, serials, manuscripts, court records, and reference publications. Access available for parts 1-4: Debates over Slavery and Abolition, Slave Trade in the Atlantic World, The Institution of Slavery, and The Age of Emancipation.
The Transformation of Shopping: Department Stores, Social Change and Consumerism, 1830-1994
Explores the daily lives of workers and consumers, offering a social and cultural history of department stores during a period in which they were adapting to evolving consumer needs, workers’ rights, and societal shifts, with a focus on life on the shop floor. Sources include company archives, trade journals, and union records.
Travel Writing, Spectacle and World History
Hundreds of accounts by women of their travels across the globe from the early 19th century to the late 20th century. Sources cover topics including the arts, the British Empire, exploration, race, and more. Contents also include manuscripts, diaries and correspondence, drawings, guidebooks and photographs.

Victorian Women Writers Project (VWWP)
Online collection featuring works of lesser-known British women writers of the 19th century - poetry, novels, children's books, political pamphlets, religious tracts, histories, and more. VWWP contains scores of authors, both prolific and rare.
Women Working 1870-1930
Includes digitized books, manuscripts, and images from Harvard University Libraries and Museums on women in the U.S. economy from 1870-1930.

Women Writers Online
A full-text collection of early women's writing in English, published by the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University. It includes full transcriptions of texts published between 1526 and 1850, focusing on materials that are rare or inaccessible and women's literate culture in the early modern period.
Women's Studies Archive (Gale Primary Sources)
Includes the modules Women's Issues and Identities, Voice and Vision, and Female Forerunners Worldwide. Focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries, including documents such as diaries, letters, photographs, news clippings, organizational records, and journals. Primary sources include a record of the issues that have affected women, societal contributions, social status, and women's movements. Topics cover abolition of slavery, alcohol and temperance movements, pacifism and political activism, domestic service, education, health and hygiene, divorce and social reform.
Women’s Voices and Life Writing, 1600-1968
Contains collections from archives across the UK and Ireland for the study of the lives and experiences of lesser-known women in their own words. Spanning a date range of 1600-1968, the resource offers avenues to explore the differing conditions in which women have lived in the UK and Ireland during the last four centuries, from experiences of wartime, witch trials, suffrage and feminist movements, to the everyday lives lived.
World's Fairs
"A global history of expositions." Official records, monographs, publicity, artwork, and artifacts from world's fairs, from the Crystal Palace in 1851 to twenty-first century expos.

Manuscripts and Ephemera: Finding Aids and Indexes

Many historical materials are not available online, and housed only in archives or in harder to find publications. These discovery tools can help identify their holdings and locations.

C19: Nineteenth Century Index
19th century books, journals, magazines, official documents, newspapers, and archives. Includes The Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, The Wellesley Index, Poole's Index, Palmer's Index to the Times, and Periodicals Index Online.
Online Archive of California (OAC)
Collection of online finding aids for special collections materials across California.

UCLA Library Special Collections
UCLA Library Special Collections is comprised of Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections; the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library History of Science and Medicine Special Collections; the Performing Arts Special Collections; the University Archives; and the Center for Oral History Research. Collections include a wide variety of literary rare books, as well as manuscripts and archival collections relating to specific individuals and organizations.

ArchiveGrid
Searches finding aids for historical documents, personal papers, and family histories held in libraries, museums, and archives around the world. Researchers searching ArchiveGrid can learn about the items in each of these collections, contact archives to arrange a visit to examine materials, and order copies.

Mazer Archive at UCLA
Digital records and finding aids for June L. Mazer Archives housed at the UCLA Library.
June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives
Located in West Hollywood, the Mazer collection is the only archive on the West Coast "dedicated exclusively to preserving lesbian history."
ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives
Large USC-affiliated research collection covering Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,and Transgendered history.
Vern and Bonnie Bullough Collection on Sex and Gender
Located at CSUN, the Bullough research collection documents the history of human sexuality, including prostitution, cross dressing, homosexuality, abortion, laws relating to sexual behavior, and sex education.
National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC)
Gateway for searching OCLC WorldCat manuscripts.