LibGuides: Women's and Gender Studies: Primary Sources

What are Primary Sources?

Primary Sources are firsthand accounts that document events, individuals, experiences, and time periods.

Examples of primary sources include:

newspaper articles
interviews and transcripts
speeches
letters
diaries
photographs
research data

Here's more on Primary Sources:

Primary vs. Secondary Sources via Minnesota History Youtube Channel

LMU Library Primary Source Collections

Archives of Sexuality & Gender This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Subjects: Women's and Gender Studies, Sociology, History
Description: Primary source collection from Gale Cengage Learning containing LGBTQ+ documents and images. Includes materials from 1950 to present. Mainly focused on the United States and Europe. Additional information about the AIDS crisis, LGBTQ+ grassroots organizations, and personal photographs from renowned activists.
Contents: Popular (Non-Scholarly) Articles - Newspapers; Popular (Non-Scholarly) Articles - Magazines; Primary Sources
More info
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new window
Subjects: Women's and Gender Studies, History
Description: Primary source collection from Alexander Street Press containing full text. Browse or search by movement name (e.g. Age of Consent, Temperance Movement, etc.)
Contents: Primary Sources
More info
Women and Social Movements International This link opens in a new window
Subjects: Women's and Gender Studies, History, Sociology
Description: Primary source collection from Alexander Street Press containing full text. Scanned documents may not have transcripts. Browse or search by organization or topic/theme (e.g. political and human rights, women and immigration, etc.).
Contents: Conference Proceedings; Primary Sources; Organizational and government documents
More info
Women's Studies Archive This link opens in a new window
Subjects: Women's Studies
Description: Primary source collection from Gale, covering nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Resources are primarily western focus with limited content from Africa, India, East Asia, and the Pacific Rim. Browse using "Explore Collection" by organization or movement.
Contents:Popular (Non-Scholarly) Articles - Newspapers; Primary Sources; organizational and government documents
More info
Social and Cultural History: Letters and Diaries Online This link opens in a new window
Subjects: Women's and Gender Studies, History, African American Studies
Description: Primary source collection from Alexander Street Press containing full text. Includes materials from 1550s-2005. Mainly focused on U.S., Canada, and Europe. Some restrictions on content access depending on repository, like oral histories. Browse by subject, historical event, or personal event.
Contents: Primary Sources
More info
Everyday Life & Women in America, c1800-1920 This link opens in a new window
Subjects: Women's and Gender Studies, Sociology
Description: Primary source collection from Adam Matthew containing documents, images, and literature. Includes materials from 1800-1920. Mainly focused on the United States.
Contents: Primary Sources
More info

Primary Sources on the Internet

Digital Transgender Archive
DTA virtually merges disparate archival collections, digital materials, and independent projects with a single search engine.
Lesbian Herstory Archives Digital Collections
Digital Public Library of America LGBT Search
American Memory (Library of Congress)
"Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920
American Women: Library of Congress
A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States. Includes photographs, manuscripts, maps, and more.
Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement
An online archival collection through Duke University. Focus is specifically on the radical origins of this movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Gifts of Speech: Women's Speeches from Around the World
Women Working. 1800-1930
Focuses on women's role in the U.S. economy and provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections.
LGBT Religious Network Exhibitions
Each exhibition explores a particular subject of LGBT religious history and includes diverse artifacts, such as photos, articles, correspondence, documents and audio or video clips, that have been found in archives.
Gender Studies Resources (GSRDB)
Gender Studies Resources is a database of born-digital projects and resources for gender studies. This project is a crowd-sourced referatory that focuses on projects that might otherwise remain uncatalogued in institutional repositories.

More Finding Aids

Online Archive of California
provides free public access to detailed descriptions of primary resource collections maintained by more than 150 contributing institutions including libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California and collections maintained by the 10 University of California (UC) campuses.
Archive Finder
Current directory which describes over 206,200 collections of primary source material housed in thousands of repositories across the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland.
National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections
The Library of Congress gateway for searching OCLC WorldCat manuscript materials