Women's Studies Archive, Part 3

Containing over one million pages of women-authored works from the American Antiquarian Society, the pre-eminent collector of pre-20th century Americana, covering over a century of female writing. This unique corpus of female-authored literature centres on the American female experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The database not only provides women’s perspective of history but is an essential resource for researchers wanting to undertake in-depth analysis into women’s authorship enabling researchers to track the development of female language, literature, and ideas.

Curated by the American Antiquarian Society the monographs were selected from across the library’s collections, including a diversity of fiction genres and non-fiction subjects, but primarily because they were authored or edited by women in an attempt to provide users with a canon of women's literature. This artificial collection has been kept deliberately broad and includes fiction, poetry, instructional guides on domestics and etiquette, personal letters, recipe books, memoirs, histories, pamphlets and leaflets, biographies and autobiographies, personal papers, children’s literature, commentaries on fashion, diaries, legal accounts, oration, political ephemera, and religious tracts. This incredibly wide scope supports a variety of research enabling users to answer questions about women's cultural contributions as well as to provide insight into women’s day-to-day lives. The individuals within range from famous figures to complete unknowns allowing scholars to make new connections as well as rediscovering lost or ignored works from the past.