Women's Studies Resources

Catalog Searching
Collections
Databases

Using the library catalog to find primary sources

Subject headings in the online catalog can be subdivided into narrower topics by the assignment of standard subheadings. For example, "History" is a subheading that may be used with the name of any country (United States--History) or group (Women --United States --History). You can browse an alphabetical listing by selecting "Subject begins with..." in the "search type" drop-down menu, and then entering a subject heading point in the search box. For help finding books in the stacks, use the guide to Book Locations.

To find primary materials, try one of these subheadings following your subject:
-- Correspondence
-- Letters
-- Diaries
-- Memoirs
-- Personal Narratives
-- Sources

For example:
Abortion -- Correspondence
United States -- History -- Civil War -- Personal Narratives

Collections of Primary Materials at Duke and Online

Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture
Located within Duke’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, the Sallie Bingham Center is a broad-based women’s history archives and library. Notable collection strengths include Southern women, girl culture, domestic culture, women authors and publishers, lay and ordained church women, women artists, the history of feminist theory and activism, women's sexuality and gender expression, and women of color.

Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library
Duke's Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library holdings total more than twelve million manuscripts and close to a quarter million printed items. These collections support research in a variety of disciplines and programs, including African-American studies, anthropology, classics, economics, history, literature, political science, religion, sociology, and women's studies.

Women’s Collections on Microfilm
Located in Perkins Library, microfilmed materials include personal papers, organizational archives, periodicals and topical collections.

North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online (NC ECHO)
A gateway to special collections in North Carolina's libraries, archives, and museums. Browse or search by subject to find collections related to women.

Databases of Primary Resources

British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries
A database of women's diaries and letters who lived in the British Isles or Ireland. Search or browse by author, place, year, source, personal or historical event.

Evans Digital Edition
A definitive resource for research on 17th and 18th century American history and life including such varied topics as agriculture, foreign affairs, diplomacy, literature, music, religion, science, philosophy, the Revolutionary War, temperance, and witchcraft.

Everyday Life and Women in America, c. 1800-1920
Includes full text and images of monographs, periodicals, pamphlets and broadsides from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke and the New York Public Library addressing 19th and early 20th century political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, employment, marriage, sexuality, home life, health, and popular pastimes.

Godey's Lady's Book
Provides the full text from issues of Godey's Lady's Book, a 19th century magazine designed to entertain, inform, and educate the women of America. It is an important resource for American life and culture in the 1800s as well as women's studies.

In the First Person
Indexes letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies within scholarly materials that are freely available on the Web and Alexander Street databases.

North American Women's Letters and Diaries
Contains over 2,000 letters and diaries from North American women from colonial times to the 1950s. It includes records from close to 1,500 women. Several of these sources have not been published.

Primary Source Microfilm’s Online Guides
A collection of guides to the microfilm sets published by Primary Source Microfilm (an imprint of Gale). The guides themselves can be downloaded.

Primary sources in US history
Finding aids to 127 microform collections, searchable by title as well as by subject: African American history, American Civil War, business and economic studies, FBI documents, immigration studies, international studies, jurisprudence, Labor studies, military history and war, Native American studies, political history, Southern history, Western U.S. history, women's history.

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
Examines United States women's social movements from colonial times to present through primary source documents. Browsable by social movement, project question, author, document genre (advertisement, diary, etc), and subject.

Women Writers Online
Provides the full text of more than 200 English-language texts written by women between 1526 and 1827. The texts can be browsed or searched. Includes letters, poems, novels, histories, drama, speeches, ecclesiastical writings, and advice books.

More Primary Source Databases