Guides: Identity Studies: Find Popular and Primary Sources

Selected Websites for Women and Gender Studies

This page has a mix of freely available websites and popular resources like magazine. These are meant to be helpful to researchers in Women and Gender Studies. They are not necessarily subscription-based article databases where one would find scholarly articles, but are carefully selected by the subject librarian in collaboration with faculty and are generally thought to be credible. However, please evaluate these for your purposes before using them.

General Interest
LGBTQ
Girl Studies
Social Issues / Human Rights
Statistics
Historical collection

General Popular and Primary Resources

Independent Voices This link opens in a new window
This collection chronicles the transformative decades of the 60s, 70s and 80s through the lens of an independent alternative press. Independent Voices provides access to over 1,000 titles of publications from feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Latinos, gays, lesbians and more.

Ms.
Ms. is an American liberal feminist magazine co-founded by second-wave feminist and sociopolitical activist Gloria Steinem.
Off Our Backs
off our backs was an American radical feminist periodical that ran from 1970 to 2008.
Bitch Magazine
Bitch Media's Mission is to provide and encourage an engaged, thoughtful feminist response to media and popular culture.
The Advocate
The oldest and largest LGBT publication in the United States.
Out Magazine
American LGBTQ news, fashion, entertainment, and lifestyle magazine, with the highest circulation of any LGBTQ monthly publication in the United States
Autostraddle
Popular website for lesbian culture, inclusive of trans and nonbinary people and all queer women.

LGBTQ Resources

ONE | National Gay & Lesbian Archives
The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives houses the world's largest research library on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,and Transgendered heritage and concerns. ONE is affiliated with but not governed by the University of Southern California.
British National Archives Gay and Lesbian History guide
Offers terms and research strategies for searching for historical records on LGBT history, especially within the UK National Archives.
Digital Transgender Archve
The purpose of the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is to increase the accessibility of transgender history by providing an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world.
That's So Gay from The Library Company of Philadelphia
An exhibition of from the archives of the Library Company of Philadelphia
Queer Zine Archive Project
The Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) was first launched in November 2003 in an effort to preserve queer zines and make them available to other queers, researchers, historians, punks, and anyone else who has an interest DIY publishing and underground queer communities.
HERstories: Lesbian History Archives
The Lesbian Herstory Archives is home to the world's largest collection of materials by and about lesbians and their communities. “Herstories: Audio/Visual Collections” contains digitized copies of some of the 3,000 oral history cassettes in the Archives' Spoken Word Collection and 950 videotapes in the Video Collection.
GLBT Historical Society
Founded in 1985, the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) Historical Society is recognized internationally as a leader in the field of LGBTQ public history. Their online collection includes digitized archival materials, exhibitions, and research guides.
Wearing Gay History
Digitized t-shirt collections of numerous lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender archives across the United States.
Mazer Lesbian Archive at UCLA
Primary source materials, particularly from California-based lesbian organizations.

Girl Studies

Femina Web Search for Women
FeMiNA – created by Cybergirl Inc. provides a searchable directory of female friendly sites and information on the World Wide Web.
The F-Bomb
The FBomb.org is a blog/community created for teenage girls who care about their rights as women and want to be heard. Young feminists who are just a little bit pissed off and very outspoken are more than welcome here.
Rookie Magazine
Archive of Rookie Magazine, which was founded in 2011 as an online magazine for and by teenagers.
Scarleteen
Inclusive and comprehensive sex ed resource for teens and young adults.
Girl Museum
Virtual museum dedicated to girlhood, collecting cross-cultural historic and contemporary images and stories from and about girlhood around the world.

Social Issues / Human Rights

Center for Reproductive Rights
Full-text publications, cases, legislative policy and statutes.
GenderIT
GenderIT.org is a project of the Women's Rights Programme of the Association for Progressive Communications. The site is meant to be a think tank OF and FOR women's rights, sexual rights and internet rights activists, academics, journalists and advocates from a range of disciplines and contexts.
USAID Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment
Documents from a U.S. government agency supporting long-term andequitable economic growth worldwide.
Women's Human Rights Resources
The Women's Human Rights Resources Programme (WHRR) collects, organizes and disseminates information on women's human rights law to facilitate research, teaching and cooperation. The information introduces women's human rights law in general, emphasizes selected international and Canadian topics, and explores the interconnections between domestic and international human rights law.
WomenWatch: UN Information and Resources on Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women
United Nations Inter-Agency Network - provides information and resources on gender equality and empowerment of women.

Statistics

United Nations Statistics Division - Demographic and Social Statistics
United Nations - Statistics covering population, family, health, education, work& politics
GenderStats
Gender Stats: database of gender statisticsProduced by The World Bank Group
United Nations Statistics Division - Gender Statistics
Gender Info 2007 is a global database of gender statistics and indicators on a wide range of policy areas, including: population, families, health, education, work, and political participation.
Woman Stats Project
The WomanStats Project facilitates understanding the linkage between the situation of women and the security of nation-states. Contains qualitative and quantitative information on over 260 indicators of women's status in 174 countries.
2020 Census: LGBTQ+
LGBTQ related demographic info from the 2020 US Census.
LGBT Demographics and Data (UCLA)
Interactive data website from the UCLA Williams Institute.
The State of the LGBTQ Community in 2020
A comprehensive new study from the Center for American Progress finds that many LGBTQ people continue to face discrimination in their personal lives, in the workplace and the public sphere, and in their access to critical health care.

Historical

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century
African American Women Writers of the 19th Century guide includes a digital collection of published works by 19th-century black women writers, biographies for each author, citations and much more.

British and Irish Womens Letters and Diaries (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new window
Includes the immediate experiences of approximately 500 women, as revealed in over 100,000 pages of diaries and letters spanning over 300 years.

Discovering American Women's History Online
This database provides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States.
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Women's History from the International Institute of Social History – A database of full-text articles
Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia | Jewish Women's Archive
Comprehensive source on the history of Jewish women and includes more than 1,700 biographies, 300 thematic essays, and 1,400 photographs and illustrations.
National Women's History Museum
National Women's History Museum online exhibitions.

North American Womens Letters and Diaries (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new window
Includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters.

Sophia Smith Collection of Women's History (Smith College)
This digital collection include video, audio, and papers related to Women's History.
The Victorian Women Writers Project
The Victorian Women’s Writers Project- Transcriptions of works by 19th c.British women
Women
Archives Library Information Center US National Archives – historical documents.