Where can I find first-hand accounts of bush nurses working during the 1956 Murray River floods? Who was the first lesbian rights organisation in the US and where can I find their newsletter? And does anyone have a good recipe for sheeps’ head pie anymore?
State Library Victoria members can access hundreds of databases from home (if your home is in Victoria). That’s millions of articles, magazines, archives, ebooks, videos, songs, audiobooks and more, available through the catalogue anytime. We’re taking a closer look at new and/or interesting databases as well as hidden gems from our collections. Read on for top picks and tips from our librarians.
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Today we’re looking at the Women’s Studies Archive, part of Gale Primary Sources.
What makes this database so great?
Female-authored primary sources
Gale’s Women’s Studies Archive acknowledges that our perception of history has been formed through a lens of male authorship, which has caused an unconscious bias in our perception. The Women’s Studies Archive attempts to correct this by highlighting women’s voices and perspectives in these collections of high-quality primary sources.
This database includes a wide range of topics and formats: female-authored literature and diaries, promotional photographs for Latina actors, industry newsletters written for the female engineers, pamphlets on family planning, even newspaper clippings from the Dear Abby and Ask Ann Landers advice columns. Important moments in feminist activism have been highlighted here alongside missionary cookbooks and even journals by eager séance participants. If it was important to women, you can read about it here!
Navigation
There are many ways to move around the archive. The database has been broken up into four modules:
- Female Forerunners Worldwide
- Issues and Identities
- Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922
- an incredible collection of female-authored writing and literature from America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This is an invaluable resource for scholars of women’s studies and/or gender studies, or of American history more broadly.
- Voice and Vision
On the homepage, click on a tile to see more information about the module and the collections held within each. When you use the search bar (below), all four modules will be searched by default, but you can select or deselect any of the modules as you choose.
You can also browse the archive using the ‘Collections’ and ‘Publications’ views (see above). Dive straight in to one of the 52 individual collections housed within the archive, such as Records of the Equal Opportunities Commission, the Malthusian 1879-1921, Suffragettes 1886-1935, or one of over 1000 individual publications that can be filtered by publication, country, language, or date range.
To make it even easier to distinguish between first-hand perspectives, Gale has included ‘author gender’ (where known) as a search filter in the ‘advanced search’ option:
Learn about women’s experiences throughout history by hearing from the women who were there.
Some highlights
Check out a large selection of journals, newsletters and newspapers relating to feminism and women’s rights all around the world – including Australia – in the Herstory Collection.
The cover for the September 1971 edition of women’s liberation newspaper MeJane (Sydney) shows the characteristically wicked sense of humour that Australian women had about the way that they were perceived by some:
MeJane typically started with a page of letters to the editor, or ‘Reactions’ – these were both positive letters written in solidarity, and extremely negative letters written in a mix of apparent shock and disgust at the content of the previous month’s paper. For anyone studying the attitudes and backlash towards feminism in 70s Sydney, you’ll find some perfectly preserved ‘reactions’ from both sides in MeJane.
Also in Herstory you can find editions of The Ladder – the first national publication for lesbians in the USA, and the first publication to include the faces and names of their lesbian models1. This newsletter was created by the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian rights organisation in America.
For something a little different, head back in time one hundred or so years to a collection of diaries written by American women on the Oregon trial in the 1850s as part of the Women’s Lives Collection. Here we can feel what might be a seed of resentment growing in Mrs Lydia A Rudd towards her husband, as well as a timeless reminder of the importance of ‘women’s work’ on great historical moments:
Within the Voice and Vision module we’ll find the archives of the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional, an American-based organisation of Latina/Chicana women, founded to promote the interests of these women in all aspects of life. Here we can find documents as diverse as a headshot of well-known actress Rose Portillo and FBI files on Chicana feminist Francisca Flores:
This module also includes the Papers of Mary E Gawthorpe, a British suffragette who worked in England and America in the late 19th and into the 20th century. Her papers include selections of photographs and postcards on a range of topics, but of particular interest are those on the women’s movement and suffrage:
The Female Forerunners Worldwide module includes an excellent collection of nursing journals from around the world, including the Zambia Nurse and Australian Bush Nursing Journal.
The September 1956 edition of the Australian Bush Nursing Journal includes several pages of letters from nurses working in flood-ravaged areas caused by the overflow of the Murray:
Also within this module is a collection of documents from Australian and New Zealand Women’s Organisations, 1835-2002, digitised from the holdings of the State Library of New South Wales. Here we can find a report written by noted Australian suffragette Vida Goldstein on an informal conference between herself and Mrs May Wright Sewall, president of the International Council of Women, held in Washington DC in 1902:
and a book of Home Cookery for Australia, prepared by the Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union of Victoria back in 1904:
Sheeps’ head pie, anyone?
All of these texts are equally important in showing the lives and opinions of real women in Australia and around the world at the times that they were created.
We hope you enjoy exploring the Gale Women’s Studies Archive.
More to explore
Check out our latest databases on trial by visiting our A-Z databases page.
More SLV blogs:
- Online Collection Spotlight: The Malthusian, a collection in the Women’s Studies Archive
- Online Collection Spotlight: Archives of Sexuality and Gender
- New York Public Library, 2022, Polonsky exhibition of the New York Public Library’s treasures – The ladder: a lesbian review, vol. 9 no. 2, accessed 17 Nov 2022,<https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/galleries/fortitude/item/5508>
What a fantastic newsletter! I am going to open all the links & spend hours having a long, enjoyable read.
Thankyou!!
Congratulations on celebration of Women’s Week. Whilst this will (understandably) be focussed on domestic celebration of womenfolk. I need to ask whether (for me and other genealogists) a particular tome can be made available?
Entitled Medieval London Widows, this is available via several online sources, Google books being one, beautifully presented with very accurate historical gleanings. Annoyingly one can view only tantalising snippets.
I would love to have this available thru SLV!!!
Hi Lorraine, I’m glad that you enjoyed the blog. I believe that the book you’re referring to is
Medieval London widows, 1300-1500 / edited by Caroline M. Barron and Anne F. Sutton. If so, we hold a copy of this book in the Library. It is held in storage, but can be made available for you within a few hours of being ordered. Unfortunately we do not have an electronic copy, but if this is a title that you are particularly interested in you could make a request for purchase via our Ask a Librarian service: https://www.slv.vic.gov.au/interact-us/ask-librarian