Explore the Many Contributions of Women Throughout History

The archive covers primarily the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and incorporates a range of primary sources, providing a close look at some of the pioneers of women’s history, a deep dive into the issues that have affected women, and the many contributions they have made to society.

Contact Your Rep

Collections

Women's Studies Archive: Issues and Identities

This archive collection traces the path of women’s issues from past to present—pulling primary sources from manuscripts, newspapers, periodicals, and more.

Women’s Studies Archive: Voice and Vision

This collection provides valuable primary source materials on the evolution of feminism and women’s experiences throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Coverage focuses on women’s political activism such as suffrage, birth control, pacifism, civil rights, and socialism across multiple geographic regions. Particular attention has been paid to material produced by women, not simply for women.

Women’s Studies Archive: Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922

The third module in Gale’s Women’s Studies Archive series, Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922, includes over one million pages of female-authored work across a diverse range of both fiction and non-fiction. Sourced from and curated by the American Antiquarian Society, this archive includes around 5,700 monographs published between 1820 and 1922 in the United States and authored by women.

Women’s Studies Archive: Female Forerunners Worldwide

This primary source archive focuses on women and organisations who broke new ground in society through business, social reform, health care, and more.

PLATINUM AWARD WINNER, 2023 MODERN LIBRARY AWARDS

Women's Studies Archive is a Platinum Award winner of the 2023 Modern Library Awards. Winners are judged by librarians in the LibraryWorks database who are actual users of the entries.

“This database is phenomenal - there is so much content within it that cannot be found elsewhere. The user interface is extremely friendly, but the best thing about it is the ability to refine by author gender. And as usual, everyone at Gale goes above and beyond.” – MLA judge

Platform Features & Tools

Term Frequency

Researchers can see the frequency of search terms within sets of content to begin identifying central themes and assessing how individuals, events, and ideas interact and develop over time.

Topic Finder

By grouping commonly occurring themes, this tool reveals hidden connections within search terms—helping to shape research by integrating diverse content with relevant information.

Cross-Search Capability

Search across the content of complementary primary source products in one intuitive environment, enabling innovative new research connections.

Learn more about the Gale Primary Sources Platform » »

Related Products

Archives of Sexuality and Gender

This series offers the largest collection available to support the study of gender and sexuality. It enables scholars to make new connections in LGBTQ history and activism, cultural studies, psychology, health, political science, policy studies, and other related areas of research.

Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Women and Transnational Networks

The Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Women and Transnational Networks collection covers issues of gender and class, igniting nineteenth-century debate in the context of suffrage movements, culture, immigration, health, and many other concerns. Using a wide array of primary source documents, including serials, books, manuscripts, diaries, reports, and visuals, this collection focuses on issues at the intersection of gender and class from the late eighteenth century to the era of suffrage in the early twentieth century, all through a transnational perspective.

Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive

The most ambitious project of its kind, the content of Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive is carefully reviewed by a renowned board of scholars and thematically arranged.  It covers a wide spectrum of interests related to the history of slavery: legal issues, the Caribbean, children and women under slavery, modes of resistance, and much more.