Godey's Lady's Book

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Cover Image, Godey's Lady's Book
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Offers material from and about "this most famous 19th-century women's magazine," a monthly that provided middle- and upper-class American women with fiction, fashion, illustrations, and editorials from 1830 through its demise in 1898. Includes three full-text issues from 1855 and a partial issue from 1852. Each page is available in medium and high resolution formats. In addition, the site contains three complete short stories; 10 synopses (200 words each) of other stories published in the magazine; 26 full-page color illustrations of scenes of domestic life; nine partial-page illustrations; 104 fashion-oriented illustrations; six examples of sheet music that appeared on a regular basis in the magazine; three architectural drawings; and three sample editorials by Sarah J. Hale, a long-time editor. Material about the magazine includes a 900-word publication history; a 1,600-word essay on publisher Louis A. Godey's column; 500-800-word biographical essays on Godey and Hale; and links to three other sites. Of interest to those studying mid-19th-century middle-class American life, women's history, print culture, fashion, domestic life, and popular literature.

Gifts of Speech: Women's Speeches from Around the World

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Logo, Gifts of Speech
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Charting changes in women's rhetoric in the public realm from 1848 to the present is possible through this archive of more than 400 speeches by influential, contemporary women. These include prominent female politicians and scientists, as well as popular culture figures. There is an emphasis on the United States (particularly after 1900), including speeches from women as diverse as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrell, Marie Curie, Helen Keller, Emma Goldman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Friedan, and Ayn Rand. A nearly complete list of Nobel lectures by women laureates provides access to acceptance speeches.

The search function is particularly useful for pulling speeches from a diverse collection into common subject groups. It also allows for the study of the language of women's public debate by following changes in the use of particular metaphors or idioms, such as the concept "motherhood."

Fly Girls

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Image, American Experience: Fly Girls
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A companion site for a PBS American Experience documentary on the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, who flew military support missions during World War II. More than 1,000 women participated in the program, marking the first time women piloted aircraft for the U.S. Army. The site includes 16 documents—including official correspondence, letters, and certificates—and transcripts of interviews with two of the pilots, a historian, and a general. Additionally, it offers a transcript of the complete one-hour broadcast; a 3,430-word excerpt from a book by a WASP test pilot; biographies of approximately 1,200 words each of three WASP pilots and three female pilots from earlier times; two video clips; a 2,100-word introductory essay; and a 1,000-word history of the B-29, a dangerous bomber WASPs flew in order to convince resistant male pilots that the plane was safe.

The site also provides a timeline, a bibliography of 22 titles, and a reference guide for teachers. With its emphasis on the experience of these pilots as women—they suffered ridicule, attacks in the press, and possibly even sabotage to their aircraft, then disbanded in December 1944 when male pilots lobbied for their jobs—the site will be of interest to those studying women's history, in addition to military history.

Emma Spaulding Bryant Letters

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Scanned Image, Letter, Duke University
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Features ten letters written in the summer 1873 from Emma Spaulding Bryant to John Bryant, her husband and a politician in the Georgia Republican Party after the Civil War. The letters, taken from the John Bryant Papers at Duke University, are accompanied by images and background notes. These documents are "unusually frank for this time period," according to the author of the site, and they "reveal much about the relationships between husbands and wives in this era, and shed light on medical practices that were often kept private." Presented by Duke's Digital Scriptorium, which provides "access to historical documentation through the use of innovative technology and collaborative development projects with Duke University faculty, students, and staff."

Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement

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Logo, Documents From the Women's Liberation
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A collection of more than 50 documents--including journal and newspaper articles, speeches, papers, manifestoes, essays, press releases, a minute book, organization statements, songs, and poems—concerning the women's liberation movement, with a focus on U.S. activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Organized into eight subject headings—General and Theoretical; Medical and Reproductive Rights; Music; Organizations and Activism; Sexuality and Lesbian Feminism; Socialist Feminism; Women of Color; and Women's Work and Roles—and searchable by keyword. Includes five related links. Selected primarily by Duke University professor Anne Valk, with assistance from Rosalyn Baxandall (SUNY, Old Westbury) and Linda Gordon (University of Wisconsin, Madison). Useful for those studying women's history and late 20th-century radical movements.

Diary of a Civil War Nurse

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Photo, Armory Square Nurses, National Library of Medicine
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As men flocked to join the Union and Confederate armies, so, too, many women left their homes to serve as nurses in the war effort. This website presents the story of one such woman, Amanda Akin, who at 35 years of age left New York to work at Armory Square Hospital in Washington, DC, for one year and three months. During that time, she both kept a journal and wrote letters to her sisters recording her experiences.

The website offers images of Akin's diary, photograph portraits, and choice quotes from her recollections, as well as brief explanations and sources related to Civil War nursing in general—for example, books of orders and photographs. The title is somewhat misleading in that the diary itself is not available on the website. Instead, the interactive document link takes you to a map of Washington, DC, with locations relevant to Akin's story and major events of the time. Each location provides photographs (sometimes with a comparison image of the location today), advertisements, and/or artworks; quotes from Akins and other sources; and a small amount of contextual information.

The site links to a copy of Amanda Akin Stearns's (Akin's married name) The Lady Nurse of Ward E which Akin penned in 1909 as a memoir of her time working in the hospital.

Civil War Women

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Portrait, Rose Greenhow, 1863, Civil War Women
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These Civil War-era documents relate to three American women of diverse backgrounds and political persuasions. The site includes correspondence and news clippings relating to Rose O'Neal Greenhow, a Confederate spy and Washington socialite, whose espionage work was so appreciated by Jefferson Davis that he "credited her with winning the battle of Manassas"; correspondence, a testimonial, and a pension certificate relating to Sarah E. Thompson, who organized Union sympathizers near her home in the predominately Confederate-leaning town of Greenville, Tennessee, aided Union officers, served as an army nurse, and lectured about her war experiences; and 16-year-old Alice Williamson, a Gallatin, Tennessee, schoolgirl who kept a 36-page diary from February to September 1864 about the Union occupation of her town and atrocities attributed to the invading army.

The materials are accompanied by 500-700 word background essays, images of original documents, and photographs of Greenhow and Thompson. Also contains nine links to additional resources.

Carrie Chapman Catt Girlhood Home and Museum

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Carrie Chapman Catt's childhood home is a good starting place for research about her work in the suffrage movement. The site provides a 900-word biographical essay of Catt, seven photographs of the 1865 Iowa farmhouse where she grew up, and a 300-word essay about the house, but its primary use is as a gateway to material about Catt and the suffrage movement. The site provides links to more than 100 archival sites, including a collection of 15 recordings of Catt speaking about suffrage. Bibliographies list 20 books, articles, and speeches by Catt, 15 books, articles, and dissertations about Catt, and 24 movies and television documentaries about suffrage. In addition, the site presents a 1,200-word essay by archivist David McCartney about FBI files on Catt.

By Popular Demand: "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920

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Logo, "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920
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A collection of 38 images relating to the women's suffrage campaign, including individual portraits, photographs of parades, newspaper cartoons, and anti-suffrage items. Searchable by keyword and arranged into subject and name indexes, the site also includes a lengthy timeline, "One Hundred Years Toward Suffrage," a bibliography, and a list of related holdings in the Library of Congress. This site is the "pictorial partner" to the documents in "'Votes for Women': Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Collection, 1848-1920."

American Women's History: A Research Guide

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Photo, Guadeloupan Woman, 1911
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Maintained by Ken Middleton, reference/microforms librarian at Middle Tennessee State University, this site provides citations and links to more than 1,700 sources on American women's history. More than 900 of these are internet sources, approximately 270 of which offer online primary sources.

Content is accessible according to type of source (such as, general reference, bibliographies, biographical sources, archival collections), location by state and region, and 72 subjects. The site also includes useful guides for finding resources. Updated frequently, this is a valuable aid to help in locating materials in women's history.