Celebrate Women’s History!
The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History is a natural place to start looking for interpretations of American women’s experiences. Begin your visit by checking out Bon Appétit! Julia Child’s Kitchen.
The Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History at Duke University has a great collection of resources on women’s history, especially on sexuality (including gay and lesbian pulp fiction), women’s music, and women in the Civil War.
The Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College is one of the best archives available for American Women’s History (they have a wealth of other materials as well, but they are particularly strong in 19th and 20th century US women’s history).
Dorothy Kenyon and Gloria Steinem ca. 1970
Looking for materials about second wave activism? Black reproductive justice? Women’s Labor?
The SSC has got it! The reference archivists are top-notch, and if you have time, stay to dig around in the Smith College Archives!
(Did you know the first women’s basketball game was played on campus in the Alumnae Gym? Or that Smith’s reputation for gender bending goes back over 100 years? Find out more!)
The Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study is another great location for research on women’s histories. In addition to their rad film series that features films with such topics as gender and law, women and travel, women artists and gender and space (awesome!), they have a whole digital collection cosponsored with Harvard’s Open Collections Program (OCP) that shares a number of images and documents with researchers around the world.
Highlights of Schlesinger’s collections include papers on Amelia Earhart
and June Jordan. A must see next time you are in Cambridge.
African American Women’s History
(Parts are cross-posted on the 2/26/10 blog entry)
Check out the National Women’s History Museum‘s newest online exhibit, Claiming Their Citizenship: African American Women from 1624-2009.
American history is broken down into 14 distinct eras, from the colonial period through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and through the 20th century’s wars, depressions, and social justice movements. Most of the women you would expect to see are here, including Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Rosa Parks, and Fannie Lou Hamer.
Middletown Women’s History Collection
Indiana Bell Telephone Co. employees, 1903
Ball State University in Indiana, through the Digital Media Repository, has digitized a number of documents relating to the history of women in Muncie, IN from the 1880s through the 1930s. The Middletown Women’s History Collection has digital archival resources in a number of categories, including Training the Young, Using Leisure, and Engaging in Community Activities.
African American Muncie Red Cross nurses, c. WWI
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