Databases

• Contemporary Women's Issues 1992-present, citations and abstracts for scholarly and popular articles, research reports, government and international agency documents, and fact sheets
• GenderWatch 1970s-present, limited full-text collection of journals, magazines, newsletters, regional publications, special reports, and conference proceedings devoted to women's issues and gender issues
• Women's Studies International women's studies, including sociology, history, politics, economics, international relations, humanities, business and education

Databases in Related Disciplines

• Academic Search Complete: articles in many disciplines, many from scholarly journals; extensive full text
• Alternative Press Index 1991-present
• Alternative Press Index Archive 1961-1990
• CQ Researcher 1923-present
• Facts.com includes Facts on File World News Digest; selected content from Issues and Controversies on File, Today's Science on File, Reuters On-Line News Service, The World Almanac and Book of Facts, The World Almanac Encyclopedia, some content from 1940-present
• Humanities Abstracts 1984-present
• Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907-1984
• Humanities International Complete popular and scholarly journal articles, book chapters, much full text in broad range of disciplines
• PAIS Archive 1915-1976
• PAIS International 1972-present, includes government, public affairs, and international relations
• Periodicals Index Online (formerly PCI) 1665-1995
• PsycINFO 1872-present, psychology
• Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection emotional and behavioral characteristics, mental processes, observational and experimental methods, psychiatry
• Social Sciences Abstracts 1971-present
• Sociological Abstracts 1963-present

For a complete listing of databases provided by UMW Libraries, please see Databases A-Z.

selected Reference Books in Simpson Library

General Women's Studies

• Encyclopedia of Women and Gender REFB HQ1115 .E52 2001b
• The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Women's Issues Worldwide REFB HQ1154 .G74 2003
• Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women REFB HQ1115 .R69 2000

Feminism and Feminist Theory

• A Glossary of Feminist Theory REFB HQ1190 .A53 2000
• Historical Dictionary of Feminism REFB HQ1115.B65 2004
• Historical Dictionary of Feminist Philosophy REFB HQ1190 .Gg36 2006
• The Routledge Critical Dictionary of Feminism and Postfeminism REFB HQ1115 .R68 2000
• The Women's Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism REFB HQ1115 .W644 2006

Women's History

• Encyclopedia of Women in the Ancient World REFB HQ1127 .S25 2001
• A History of Women in the United States: State-by-State Reference REFB HQ1410 .H58 2004
• Women in the Middle Ages REFB HQ1143 .W643 2004
• Women in World History REFB HQ1115 .W6 1999

Websites

Gateway Sites

• WSSLinks: Women and Gender Studies Web Sites from the Women’s Studies Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)
• Women’s Studies Online Resources from University of Maryland, Baltimore County, professor Joan Korenman, Founding Director of the Center for Women and Information Technology
• INTUTE Social Sciences: Women’s Studies (formerly SOSIG, Social Sciences Information Gateway) from the United Kingdom

Bibliographies and Freely accessible Periodical Article Indexes

• Annotated Bibliography and Guide to Archival Resources on the History of Jewish Women in America produced by Phyllis Homan Weisbard, University of Wisconsin System Women’s Studies Librarian
• Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index Searchable, annotated index of articles in more than 600 journals, essays in books, and book reviews about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages, compiled by academic librarians and scholars
• ViVa: A Bibliography of Women’s History in Historical and Women’s Studies Journals Citations and some annotations for more than 7,000 articles about women’s and gender history published from 1975 to 2003 in English, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, and selected from 160 international journals, from the ViVa project of the Netherlands'’s International Institute of Social History (Vrouwengeschiedenis in het Vaktijdschrift or Women's History in Professional Journals)

Primary Sources on the Web

Because women’s studies is an interdisciplinary field, the exact definition of primary sources may vary depending on the focus of one’s research. In women’s studies, primary sources are often considered to be the documents that speak directly about women and their own experience of their lives. Such documents may be letters, diaries, autobiographies, contemporaneous media accounts of events, or even statistical reports.

• American Women: Searching American Memory for Women’s History Materials
  Guide to finding digitized primary sources on the Library of Congress American Memory site, from photographs to 19th century etiquette manuals to oral history audio files
• Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement
  Small, eclectic, but rich online collection of digitized original documents from the Duke University Special Collections Library, includes images and text of newsletters, news clippings, personal manifestos, conference papers, and other items generally from the radical feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s
• Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
  Companion site to the PBS film produced by Ken Burns and Paul Barnes, includes annotated links to seminal documents of 19th century feminism and to digitized documents in other online collections, plus video and sound clips
• United States Historical Census Data Browser
  Easy-to-access demographic data from the U.S. decennial census from 1790 through 1960, from the Geostat Center of the University of Virginia
• Women’s Travel Writing, 1830-1930
  Digitized excerpts, illustrations, and transcriptions for more than 25 travel diaries, letters, journals, and other primary materials by women traveling throughout the globe, including letters from abroad by Harriet Beecher Stowe, produced by the Women’s Studies Digitization Project of the University of Minnesota but no longer updated

Women and Their Societies

• Rural Womyn Zone Gateway site for and by women living in rural areas of United States and Canada, including blog, links, and news
• UNIFEM: United Nations Development Fund for Women UNIFEM "provides financial and technical assistance to innovative programmes and strategies that promote women’s human rights, political participation and economic security, includes key UN documents on women’s rights, such as The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Beijing Platform for Action, adopted in 1995, and links to UNIFEM regional sites