Brooklyn College Library LibGuides Home: Women's Studies: Research

Events

The Free Black Women's Library is coming to Brooklyn College, February 21 through March 20!

Visit the Library exhibit both in the Library and participate in a book swap.

Special Event featuring TFBWL Installation:

Libraries Filling Voids, Libraries Making Connections, and Libraries Fostering Collaborations:

Perspectives From Three Innovators Invigorating American Culture

Monday, March 20, 2023 9:30-10:30am

The Brooklyn College Library

The Woody Tanger Auditorium

Library spaces and the books they offer have not always been reflective of the communities they serve. In response, libraries have begun to offer the perspectives of marginalized voices in the BIPOC and LGBTQA+ communities. This evolution has led to push back from conservatives who are legislating to silence these emerging voices. Many in the library community are resisting and insisting on serving their users and meeting their needs. Three panelists will discuss their innovative work that is changing the nature of libraries and their relation to the wider community. Our speakers include:

Ola Ronke Akinmowo – Artist, scholar and founder of The Free Black Women’s Library, a Bedford-Stuyvesant library and community space.

Rakisha Kearns-White – Brooklyn Public Library senior young adult services librarian responsible for sex education programming and menstrual literacy education.

Summer Boismier – In charge of teen initiatives at Brooklyn Public Library, formerly a high school English teacher in Oklahoma who gained national attention for promoting the BPL “Books Unbanned” for her students and for having her teaching license threatened to be revoked as a result.

Book Swap to follow!

Bring a book by a Black woman or non-binary author and exchange it for a book in The Free Black Women’s Library Installation in the Library exhibit space!

Brooklyn College Women's Center

Find your community on-campus and online!

Starting Points for Research in Women's Studies

Looking for a topic? Try the Institute for Women's Policy Research.

Looking for books and not sure how to find them? Start here.

Looking for articles and don't know where to go? Start here.

Search for books, articles, media and more using

Databases for Women's Studies

SocINDEX with Full Text This link opens in a new window
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Excellent resource offers comprehensive coverage of the literature of sociology, encompassing all sub-disciplines and closely related areas of study.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new window
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The collection currently includes 116 document projects and archives with 4,700 documents and more than 160,000 pages of additional full-text documents, written by more than 2,450 primary authors. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools.

Statistics for Women's Studies

Trustworthy and current statistics on women from the World Bank, the United Nations and other sources.

Gender Equality Data and Statistics

Gender Statistics

The World's Women 2010: Trends and Statistics

Womanstats Project

Contact for Women's Studies

Beth Evans

Contact:

Brooklyn College Library
Room 148
2900 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11210

Subjects: Africana Studies, Caribbean Studies, Judaic Studies, Puerto Rican & Latino Studies, Scholarly Communication, Studies in Religion, Women's Studies

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Video Resources for Women's Studies

Alexander Street Press
A resource for film covering history, ethnography, and music. Also includes the PBS video collection.

Docuseek for Women's Studies
Includes films from Women Make Movies and other vendors.

Books Recently Added to the Collection

Additional Resources

Feminist Network Project
A Google map showing where feminist activists and organizations are located around the world. Zoom in on map to useful organization web sites.
FemTechNet
Find many resources for learning more about feminism, cyberfeminism, and feminist theories of technology, including videos with major scholars and subject matter experts, reading lists and bibliographies.
Women's Audio Visuals in English
A database maintained by the University of Wisconsin lists television series and documentary, experimental, and feature film and video productions by and about women.
Poster collection of Alice Park, 1903-1926
Suffrage posters in Harvard's Schlesinger Library. Many were used in campaigns, allowed the suffrage movement to enlist support and create appealing imagery for their cause in order to counteract the often negative depictions and caricatures appearing daily in newspapers by the anti-suffrage movement.

Primary Resources for Women's Studies

African American Women Writers of the 19thCentury
Public access to the full text of 52 published works; created by The Schomberg Center, New York Public Library.
Documents From the Women's Liberation Movement
The materials in this on-line archival collection document various aspects of the Women's Liberation Movement in the United States, and focus specifically on the radical origins of this movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Items range from radical theoretical writings to humorous plays to the minutes of an actual grassroots group.
Dovie Horvitz Collection
The Dovie Horvitz Collection consists of over 1,300 images and scanned texts representing objects and printed matter that reflect the lives of women from the mid 1800s through the mid 1900s.
Fannie Lou Hamer: Papers of a Civil Rights Activist, Political Activist, and Woman
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Fannie Lou Hamer was the daughter of sharecroppers. In 1963, she became the field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She was one of the founders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. This collection comprises more than three thousand pieces of correspondence plus financial records, programs, photographs, newspaper articles, invitations, and other printed items.
Feminism in Cuba
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A study on feminists and the feminist movement in Cuba, from the time of Cuban independence to the end of the Batista regime. The documents, most in Spanish, fall into three categories: works by feminists about feminists and their causes; works by men on the status of women; literary works by feminist writers that illustrate or discuss the condition of women.
Gifts of Speech: Women’s Speeches from Around the World
Gifts of Speech is a non-profit project, sponsored by Sweet Briar College, dedicated to preserving and creating access to speeches by inspirational, influential and contemporary, women from around the world.
In Her Own Right
Primary sources and essays revealing stories of women's activism leading up to the right to vote.
International Women's Movement: The Pan Pacific/Southeast Asia Womens Association/1950-1985
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The Pan Pacific and Southeast Asia Women's Association (PPSEAWA) was founded in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1930 with the intention of promoting cooperation among women of these regions for the study and improvement of social, economic, and cultural conditions. In the early 1950s, PPSEAWA established consultative status at the United Nations and UNESCO as a non-governmental organization.
Laura X World Institute
Documents, media, and other materials collected by Laura X aka Laura Rand Orthwein, Jr. pertaining to the women's movement and a wide array of precursors and overlapping social movements from the second half of the 20th century.
Records of the National Organization for Women
Schlesinger Library Digital Collections
Fully digitized collections include Susan B. Anthony, Beecher-Stowe Family, Blackwell Family, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Dorothy West. Partially digitized collections include the papers of Inez Milholland and Doris Stevens. Additionally, the audiotapes and transcripts of the Black Women’s Oral History Project and the complete run of the Women’s Journal are also digitized.
Women's Issues and Their Advocacy Within The White House, 1974-1977
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This collection documents Patricia Lindh’s and Jeanne Holm’s liaison with women’s groups and their advocacy within the White House on issues of special interest to women. Includes material accumulated by presidential Counselor Anne Armstrong and Office of Women’s Programs Director Karen Keesling.
Women Organizing Transnationally: The Committee of Correspondence, 1952-1969
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The records include extensive official correspondence (1952-69) as well as hundreds of letters to and from correspondents throughout the world documenting the work of the organization. In addition there are official records; minutes; complete files of multi- lingual publications entitled "Community Action Series" and "Meeting Community Needs;" miscellaneous publications; conferences and workshop material; files on individual participants, filed by country. The country files also contain published materials pertaining to the status and problems of the world's women.
Women's Studies Research Guide from University of Michigan
Links to archival collections.
Women, War and Society, 1914-1918 Digital Archive
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The First World War had a revolutionary impact on the personal, social and professional lives of all women. These unique documents -- charity and international relief reports, pamphlets, photographs, and press cuttings -- are published here for the first time in fully searchable form. The researcher can study themes such as the day-to-day life in wartime hospitals, women's activities in Canada, Australia, South Africa and other regions of the world, as well as the numerous accounts of hardship, heroism and loyalty.

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Women's Studies: Research