20th 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 This link opens in a new window
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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 This link opens in a new window
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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 This link opens in a new window
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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. - Gender: Identity and Social Change This link opens in a new window
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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. - Archives Unbound (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
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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 This link opens in a new window
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Explore late 19th-20th century African American communities in different cities through pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, reports, and oral histories.
- American Consumer Culture: Market Research and American Business, 1935-1965 This link opens in a new window
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Provides insight into the American consumer boom of the mid-20th century through access to the complete market research reports of Ernest Dichter, the era's foremost consumer analyst and market research pioneer. - American Consumer Culture: Market Research and American Business, 1935-1965 This link opens in a new window
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Market Research and American Business, 1935-1965 provides a unique insight into the American consumer boom of the mid-20th century through access to the complete market research reports of Ernest Dichter, the era?s foremost consumer analyst and market research pioneer. - Archives of Sexuality and Gender (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
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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). - Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection: Series 1 This link opens in a new window
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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. - Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movements This link opens in a new windowBehind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movements focuses on unearthing and digitizing the histories of civil rights activism by the everyday citizens of Black, Latine, Indigenous, and Asian American/Pacific Islander communities. The program will include up to four collections, targeted for completion by the end of 2025.
- Black Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
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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. - Border and Migration Studies Online This link opens in a new window
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Documents, videos, and images providing historical background on 30 key border areas, including: US and Mexico; the European Union; Afghanistan; Israel; Turkey; The Congo; Argentina; China; and Thailand. - Defining Gender, 1450-1910 This link opens in a new window
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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.
- Digital Transgender Archive This link opens in a new windowInternational open access online hub focused on accessibility of transgender history. DTA is a collaboration among more than twenty institutions, including digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world.
- Disability in the Modern World This link opens in a new window
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Includes digitized resources on disability history and disability studies, including history, media, the arts, political science, education, and other subject areas. Includes primary sources, videos (documentaries, interviews, art films, performances), archival materials, advertising, and secondary monographs.
- Discovering American Women's History OnlineBrings together hundreds of primary source digital collections covering U.S. women’s history.
- Dovie Horvitz CollectionThe 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 This link opens in a new window
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Contains first-person accounts, including letters and diaries, narratives, and other primary source materials.
- Empire Online
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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
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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.
- First World War This link opens in a new window
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Primary source content from World War I, plus contextual secondary sources. UCLA subscribes to the following modules: Personal Experiences, Propaganda and Recruitment, Visual Perspectives and Narratives. - Feminism in Cuba: Nineteenth through Twentieth Century Archival Documents (Archives Unbound) This link opens in a new windowThis 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 This link opens in a new window
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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. - Food Studies Online This link opens in a new window
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Provides interdisciplinary archival content, visual ephemera, monographs, and videos that explore how food shapes the world around us. Includes cookbooks, menus, documentaries, vintage commercials, diet trends, and more. - Frontier life: Borderlands, Settlements, and Colonial Encounters This link opens in a new window
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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 This link opens in a new window
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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) This link opens in a new window
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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 This link opens in a new window
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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.
- HEARTH: Home Economics ArchiveHEARTH is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines.
- History of Mass Tourism This link opens in a new window
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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 This link opens in a new window
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UC-wide trial 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. Alternative older interface portal for History Vault also available through 1/8/2025.
- Human Rights Documentation InitiativeFrom the U. of Texas, this site makes available archived web resources related to human rights organizations and issues.
- Human Rights Studies Online This link opens in a new window
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Provides comparative documentation, analysis, and interpretation of major human rights violations and atrocity crimes worldwide from 1900 to 2010. Includes primary and secondary materials across multiple media formats and content types. Topics include Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Darfur, and more. - Independent Voices This link opens in a new window
Full text of more than 1000 open access alternative publications from the 1960s-1980s covering feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Latinos, LGBTQ+ activists, and more.
- International Women’s Movement: The Pan Pacific Southeast Asia Women’s Association of the USA, 1950-1985 (Archives Unbound) This link opens in a new window
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The group promoted cooperation among women of these regions for the study and improvement of social, economic, and cultural conditions; engaged in studies on Asian and Pacific affairs; provided hospitality to temporary residents and visitors from Pacific and Asian areas; and presented programs of educational and social
interest, dealing with the customs and cultures of Asian and Pacific countries. - International Women’s Periodicals, 1786-1933: Social and Political Issues (Archives Unbound) This link opens in a new window
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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 This link opens in a new window
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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 This link opens in a new window
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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. - LGBT Magazine Archive This link opens in a new window
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Searchable archive of major periodicals devoted to LGBT+ interests, dating from the 1950s to more recent years. Includes many of the most influential, long-running 20th/21st-century magazines in this field, including The Advocate. UCLA subscribes to Collection 1 of this database. - LGBT Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
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Online portal with full text books, periodicals, and archival materials documenting LGBT political, social and cultural movements from the 20th century to the present. The purchase of LGBT Thought and Culture was made possible through a generous gift from the David Bohnett Foundation.
- Library of Congress Digital CollectionsOnline access to manuscripts, ephemera, images, maps, and more. Includes several sets of materials related to the suffrage movement.
- London Low Life This link opens in a new window
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Contains primary source materials on Victorian street culture, including ephemera, penny fiction, cartoons, chapbooks, reform literature, and guides to prostitution.
- Making of Modern Law: The American Civil Liberties Union Papers (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
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The records of the ACLU on free speech, citizenship, race, discrimination, immigration, labor, radicalism, and related topics support the study of American legal history and complement the modules in the Making of Modern Law series. Documents include newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, court files, memorandums, telegrams, minutes, and legal case records. UCLA provides access to Parts I and II: 1912-1990, and Southern Regional Office, - Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926 (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
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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.
- Mass Observation Online This link opens in a new window
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Mass Observation was a social research organization whose papers provide insights into the cultural and social history of Britain from 1937 to 1965. Includes file reports and personal docments covering a range of topics, including abortion, old age, crime, eating habits, shopping, fashion, dance, popular music, sex, sport, reading, ethnic minorities, and the decline of Empire. - Migration to New Worlds This link opens in a new window
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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. - North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories This link opens in a new window
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Personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives, the series provides a rich source for scholars in a wide range of disciplines. In selected cases, users will be able to hear the actual audio voices of the immigrants. - Political Extremism and Radicalism (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
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Primary source documentation of 20th Century (1900s-2010s) fringe groups from both the right and left of the political spectrum in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. Supports researchers addressing historical questions on philosophical, social, political, and economic ideologies as well as on contemporary issues surrounding gender, sexuality, race, religion, civil rights, universal suffrage, and more. UCLA subscribes to parts I and II.
Content note: this database contains visual and textual material representing various historical viewpoints related to race, gender, sexuality, terrorism, and other subjects, including terminology and concepts that may be considered offensive by modern standards. These materials are provided for academic research and teaching purposes. - Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975: Rock and Roll, Counterculture, Peace and Protest This link opens in a new window
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This online portal explores the period of social, political and cultural change between 1950 and 1975. It includes color images of manuscript and rare printed material as well as photographs, historical news video, ephemera and memorabilia. - Power to the People: Counterculture, Social Movements, and the Alternative Press, Nineteenth to Twenty-first Century This link opens in a new window
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Showcases a range of ideas, initiatives, and social movements devoted to people-powered politics and organizing from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries with subjects such as the civil rights movement, the 1960s counterculture movement, and other social movements in U.S. history. Paints a broad picture of the counterculture and many disparate organizations that represent this moment in modern Western history.
- Project Diana: An Online Human Rights ArchiveAn international archive of human rights legal documentation, provided by Yale Law School.
- Queer Pasts This link opens in a new window
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A collection of primary source exhibits for students and scholars of queer history and culture. Each of the document collections includes a critical introductory essay that helps explain the significance of the primary sources. This database prioritizes the experiences and perspectives of under-represented historical groups, including people of color, trans people, and people with disabilities. - Sex and Sexuality This link opens in a new window
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Digital collection exploring attitudes towards human sexuality, gender identities and sexual behaviors throughout the twentieth century. Includes the unpublished papers of prominent sexologists, sex researchers, societies, advocacy groups and campaigners working across America and beyond during the twentieth century.
- South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)Documents the South Asian diaspora communities from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and many other nations in the United States. It includes rare materials from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
- The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives This link opens in a new window
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This searchable database brings the 1960s alive through diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary. The database covers subjects in arts, music, and leisure, civil rights, counter-culture, law and government, mass media, new left and emerging neo-conservative movement, student activism, Vietnam War, women's movement, etc.
- Trade Catalogues and the American Home This link opens in a new window
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Covers study of domestic consumerism, life and leisure in America between 1850-1950 via highly illustrated trade catalogues. Topics include various aspects of design, fashion, gender studies, food and drink, and more. - Travel Writing, Spectacle and World History This link opens in a new window
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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. - Vogue Archive This link opens in a new window
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Contains the entire run of Vogue magazine (US edition) from 1892 to the present day. - Women in the National Archives This link opens in a new window
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Includes a Finding Aid to Women's Studies Resources in The National Archives at Kew, and original documents on the Suffrage Question in Britain, the Empire and Colonial Territories.
- Women Working 1870-1930Includes digitized books, manuscripts, and images from Harvard University Libraries and Museums on women in the U.S. economy from 1870-1930.
- Women's Magazine Archive This link opens in a new window
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Contains historical backfiles of several leading consumer magazines: Better Homes and Gardens, Chatelaine, Cosmopolitan, Essence, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Parents, Redbook, Seventeen, Town and Country, Woman's Day, and Women's International Network News. UCLA has access to collections 1 and 2 of this database. - Women's Studies Archive (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
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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. - Archives of Latin American and Caribbean History, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century This link opens in a new window
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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. - World's Fairs This link opens in a new window
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"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.
Archived Web Content
Increasingly, content is "born digital," as opposed to being published or even available in a physical medium like paper. These projects seek to preserve websites, blogs, and other digital content online.
- Archive-It Web ArchivesFrom the Internet Archive and sponsoring campuses, a collection of curated web content representing organizations, social movements, etc.
- Wayback Machine (Internet Archive)If you know the URL for a website that has changed or been shut down, the Wayback machine may be able to retrieve archived versions of the content.