Women's History: Recommended Websites

In the fall of 2017, when the New York Times and other media began reporting on widespread sexual harassment and assault by powerful male entertainment figures, many people were heartened. The conventional wisdom was that bringing the issue to light and punishing those responsible would have a deterrent effect. Leanne Atwater, a management professor at the University of Houston, had a different response. “Most of the reaction to #MeToo was celebratory; it assumed women were really going to benefit,” she says. But she and her research colleagues were skeptical. “We said, ‘We aren’t sure this is going to go as positively as people think—there may be some fallout.’”

It’s been two years since the New York Times and New Yorker investigation into the sexual misdeeds of Harvey Weinstein unleashed the #MeToo movement and a courageous fury over the ways women are mistreated. We look back at the movement that has completely reshaped the way we think of men, women, sex, and power.

Including portraits of women in the British America colonies & around the World

In America’s most defining moments—times that shaped constitutional rights, yielded scientific breakthroughs, created the symbols of our nation—a diversity of women’s stories has not been widely told. The Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative illuminates women’s pivotal roles in building and sustaining our country and will expand what we know of our shared history.
With a digital-first mission and focus, the initiative uses technology to amplify a diversity of women’s voices—not in one gallery or museum, but throughout the Smithsonian’s many museums, research centers, cultural heritage affiliates and wherever people are online—reaching millions of people in Washington, D.C., across the nation, and around the world.

Spanning over six centuries from the Renaissance to today, NMWA’s collection includes works by more than 1,000 nationally and internationally renowned artists.

Most of the prints in the exhibit "Beauty, Virtue and Vice: Images of Women in Nineteenth-Century American Prints" were designed simply to please the eye, but they are also useful to historians who would like to understand how nineteenth-century Americans thought about the world in which they lived. Although prints are often works of imagination (even when they are grounded in fact), they still have much to tell us about the time and place in which they were created.

The Cartoonists of Color, Queer Cartoonists, and Disabled Cartoonists databases were created and are maintained by cartoonist MariNaomi as a way to spotlight marginalized comics creators. The databases are used by booksellers, librarians, academics, editors, book publishers, event organizers, readers, and more.

Click! In the 1970s that word signaled the moment when a woman awakened to the powerful ideas of contemporary feminism. Today “click” usually refers to a computer keystroke that connects women (and men) to powerful ideas on the Internet.
We aim to bridge the gap between those two clicks by offering an exhibit that highlights the achievements of women from the 1940s to the present. This exhibit explores the power and complexity of gender consciousness in modern American life.

We looked at 19 years of covers to find how Vogue represents women of all shades

This site provides access to photographs, manuscripts, books, audio recordings, and other materials of historical interest that have been digitized and made available by members of Digital Commonwealth, a statewide consortium of libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies from across Massachusetts

Based at Middle Tennessee State University, this valuable database gives interested parties access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, and so on) that document the history of women in the United States.

The Equal Justice Initiative is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.

January 30, 2023 World Health Organization (WHO)

What does ‘flapper’ mean? Even though the true origins of the world are controversial, in the 1920s ‘flapper’ became associated with young women who expressed their freedom through an overt appreciation of a new kind of fashionable look. December 11, 2020

Global Fund for Women exists to support the tireless and courageous efforts of women’s groups who work every day to win rights for women and girls. These groups are working to ensure women can own property, vote, run for office, get paid fair wages, and live free from violence – including domestic violence, sexual assault, and harmful practices such as female genital mutilation.

Gender parity is fundamental to whether and how economies and societies thrive. Ensuring the full development and appropriate deployment of half of the world’s total talent pool has a vast bearing on the growth, competitiveness and future-readiness of economies and businesses worldwide. The Global Gender Gap Report benchmarks 144 countries on their progress towards gender parity across four thematic dimensions: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.

The Global Gender Gap Index annually benchmarks the current state and evolution of gender parity across four key dimensions (Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment). It is the longest-standing index tracking the progress of numerous countries’ efforts towards closing these gaps over time since its inception in 2006.

The Guttmacher Institute envisions a future in which all people can realize their rights and access the resources they need to achieve sexual and reproductive health. This vision is aligned with a progressive and evidence-based definition of SRHR, grounded in human rights, which holds that sexual and reproductive health is not merely the absence of disease, dysfunction or infirmity but a state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being in all aspects of sexuality and reproduction.

The world is at a turning point. People everywhere understand and support the idea of gender equality. They know it’s not just a women’s issue, it’s a human rights issue. And when these powerful voices are heard, they will change the world. The time for that change is now.

Mapping Diversity is a platform for discovering key facts about diversity and representation in street names across Europe, and to spark a debate about who is missing from our urban spaces. We looked at the names of 145,930 streets across 30 major European cities, located in 17 different countries. More than 90% of the streets named after individuals are dedicated to white men. Where did all the other inhabitants of Europe end up? The lack of diversity in toponymy speaks volumes about our past and contributes to shaping Europe’s present and future.

The National Women’s History Alliance formerly, the National Women’s History Project, is a leader in promoting Women’s History and is committed to the goals of education, empowerment, equality, and inclusion.

To help women join and win their landmark discrimination case against
USDA: Love v Vilsak

Women in the United States have made significant strides toward closing the gaps that have kept them from achieving equality with men. But the country is sharply divided over how much work remains to be done, and those divisions are rooted mainly in the growing partisan schism that pervades American values and culture these days.

Most Americans find women indistinguishable from men on key leadership traits such as intelligence and capacity for innovation, yet women still make up a small share of top leadership jobs. Our full report explores Americans’ views about women leaders, the barriers they face and prospects for the future. Below, we’ve charted the share of women in top U.S. political and business roles over time and set the scale at 50% to show the halfway mark.

RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) is the nation's largest anti-sexual violence organization. RAINN created and operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline (800.656.HOPE, online.rainn.org y rainn.org/es) in partnership with more than 1,000 local sexual assault service providers across the country and operates the DoD Safe Helpline for the Department of Defense. RAINN also carries out programs to prevent sexual violence, help survivors, and ensure that perpetrators are brought to justice.

June 24, 2020

July 2019

Washington Post updated regularly

Women are approaching a milestone in gender parity. 2019 will likely be the first year in which they are a majority of the college-educated labor force. As of the first quarter of 2019, 29.5 million women in the labor force had at least a bachelor’s degree, effectively matching the number of college-educated men in the workforce (29.3 million), according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA; Title IV of P.L. 103-322) was originally enacted in 1994. It addressed congressional concerns about violent crime, and violence against women in particular, in several ways. It allowed for enhanced sentencing of repeat federal sex offenders; mandated restitution to victims of specified federal sex offenses; and authorized grants to state, local, and tribal law enforcement entities to investigate and prosecute violent crimes against women, among other things. VAWA has been reauthorized three times since its original enactment. Most recently, Congress passed and President Obama signed the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 (P.L. 113-4), which reauthorized most VAWA programs through FY2018, among other things.

The website is the home of a searchable database of articles and papers on pioneering women lawyers in the United States.

January 29, 2021

Tracking sustainable peace through inclusion, justice, and security for women.

All of the major world religions deprecate women to some degree. This page archives texts which relate specifically to women and religion from a female perspective. This includes historic feminist texts on the topic, texts about Goddess-oriented spirituality and Amazons, as well as texts from otherwise male-dominated religions in the same vein. As might be expected, there are far fewer of these than might be desired.

Today we highlight women who have been elected to national legislatures and as the leaders of different countries.

Our final post will cover women in the law, including the first women lawyers and judges in different countries.

In our first post, we look at women’s voting rights.

The Status of Women in the States provides data on women’s progress in 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the United States overall.

Click on the Report to read the PDF

WDL items can be browsed by place, time, topic, type of item, language, and contributing institution. The search feature can be used to search all of the metadata and descriptions and the full text of printed books on the site.

Each item on the WDL is accompanied by an item-level description that explains its significance and historical context. Additional information about selected items is provided by curator videos. Other features include advanced image-viewing, timelines, interactive maps, and in-depth thematic sections on selected topics (in preparation).

The ZORA Canon, our list of the 100 greatest books ever written by African American women, is one of a kind, yet it exists within a rich cultural tradition.

Celebrate Women’s History Month all March with JSTOR Daily. We hope you’ll find the stories below, and the scholarship they include in full, a valuable resource for classroom or leisure reading

Since 2006, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has published an annual Global Gender Gap Report. In these reports, WEF "quantifies the magnitude of gender disparities and tracks their progress over time, with a specific focus on the relative gaps between women and men across four key areas: health, education, economy and politics."
The latest annual report, released in November 2016, covers 144 countries and marks the 11th installment. As the WEF notes, "more than a decade of data has revealed that progress is still too slow for realizing the full potential of one half of humanity within our lifetimes."
We analyzed this data and built an interactive story to explore it.

Theme: “Honoring Trailblazing Women in Labor and Business”

The theme for 2019 is “Visionary Women: Champions of Peace & Nonviolence.” This year we honor women who have led efforts to end war, violence, and injustice and pioneered the use of nonviolence to change society. These Honorees embraced the fact that the means determine the ends and so developed nonviolent methods to ensure just and peaceful results.

Our 2020 theme celebrates the women who have fought for woman’s right to vote in the United States. In recognition of the centennial of the 19th Amendment, we will honor women from the original suffrage movement as well as 20th and 21st century women who have continued the struggle (fighting against poll taxes, literacy tests, voter roll purges, and other more contemporary forms of voter suppression) to ensure voting rights for all.

The theme for 2021 National Women’s History Month captures the spirit of these challenging times: Valiant Women of the Vote: Refusing to Be Silenced.
Since most 2020 women’s suffrage centennial celebrations were curtailed, the National Women’s History Alliance is extending the celebration into 2021, and expanding on the 2020 Theme.

The 2022 Women’s History theme, “Providing Healing, Promoting Hope,” is both a tribute to the ceaseless work of caregivers and frontline workers during this ongoing pandemic and also a recognition of the thousands of ways that women of all cultures have provided both healing and hope throughout history.

The National Women’s History Alliance, which spearheaded the movement for March being declared National Women’s History Month, has announced the women’s history theme for 2023, “Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories.”Throughout 2023, the NWHA will encourage recognition of women, past and present, who have been active in all forms of media and storytelling including print, radio, TV, stage, screen, blogs, podcasts, and more. The timely theme honors women in every community who have devoted their lives and talents to producing art, pursuing truth, and reflecting the human condition decade after decade.

The National Women’s History Month’s theme for 2024 celebrates “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.” The theme recognizes women throughout the country who understand that, for a positive future, we need to eliminate bias and discrimination entirely from our lives and institutions.

Profile America Facts For Features--U. S. Census [PDF]

The year 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing and protecting women's constitutional right to vote. This historic centennial offers an unparalleled opportunity to commemorate a milestone of democracy and to explore its relevance to the issues of equal rights today. The Women's Vote Centennial Initiative, a collaboration of women centered institutions, organizations, and scholars from across the US, works to ensure that this anniversary, and the 72-year fight to achieve it, are commemorated and celebrated throughout the United States.

There are a number of major Supreme Court decisions about voting rights that have been lost in time. Cases from from the 1870s through the 1890s that absolutely decimated the force and impact of the 14th and 15th Amendments, and crushed democracy for much of the 20th century—confined to mere footnotes if mentioned at all. I like to dig through these cases not only because of their historic import, but because their style, approach and outcomes bear a lot of similarity to the current Supreme Court’s approach to cases impacting voting rights and democracy. They also provide yet another reminder of how much activists had to fight through to make progress for our democracy.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton--one of the Seneca Falls convention leaders--reminisced, "We were but a handful..." recalling the supporters of woman suffrage at the convention, where the right to vote was their most radical demand. Between this first convention advocating the rights of women and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women's right to vote in 1920 lay a long and arduous journey. Victory was never assured until the final moments. In the intervening years, the drive for women's voting rights encompassed the lives of several generations of women. Suffrage supporters survived a series of dramatic transformations in their movement that included: fifty years of educating the public to establish the legitimacy of woman suffrage; approximately twenty years of direct lobbying as well as dramatic militant action to press their claim to the vote; the division of each generation into moderate and radical camps; and the creation of a distinct female political culture and imagery to promote "votes for women."

Suffrage100MA is dedicated to commemorating the upcoming 100th anniversary of the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1920, prohibiting the federal and state governments from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change in the Constitution. Militant suffragists used tactics such as parades, silent vigils, and hunger strikes. The records of the National Archives and Records Administration reveal much of this struggle.

July 6, 2023 The fight for women’s suffrage is often depicted as pitting women against men. But some women made it their life’s mission to campaign against it.

February 16, 2023

July 19, 2023

Far from being a recent or 21st-century phenomenon, people have chosen, courageously, to trans gender throughout history

Over 75 magazines, newsletters, and newspapers created by activists and collectives that helped propel the second wave of feminism from the late sixties and early seventies through the end of the 20th century. Groups represented by these publications include the Redstockings, New York Radical Women, Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, the Third World Women’s Alliance, and many others. Abortion, rape, unequal pay, women in the service, child care, women’s self-help, pornography, gender roles, and many other major issues of the period were extensively covered in the pages of the feminist press.

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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist.

February 27, 2024

July 29, 2021

The first female English authors were thought to have begun writing in the later middle ages, but a new book claims the tradition dates back to the eighth century

Working to elevate the voices of women + non-binary visual storytellers

The IVMF at Syracuse University is higher education’s first interdisciplinary academic institute, singularly focused on advancing the post-service lives of the nation’s military veterans and their families to serve those who have served.

June 7, 2022

March 6, 2019

Download the PDF of the book

March 31, 2020

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May 9, 2022

Aid Access is the private initiative of Dr Rebecca Gomperts,
It consists of committed team of doctors, activists and advocates for abortion rights. The purpose of the website and the service is to create social justice and improve the health status and human rights of women who do not have the possibility of accessing local abortion services.

May 6, 2022

April 11, 2023

May 11, 2022

Held: The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives. June 24, 2022

Appellant Griswold is Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut. Appellant Buxton is a licensed physician and a professor at the Yale Medical School who served as Medical Director for the League at its Center in New Haven—a center open and operating from November 1 to November 10, 1961, when appellants were arrested...

The Guttmacher Institute envisions a future in which all people can realize their rights and access the resources they need to achieve sexual and reproductive health. This vision is aligned with a progressive and evidence-based definition of SRHR, grounded in human rights, which holds that sexual and reproductive health is not merely the absence of disease, dysfunction or infirmity but a state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being in all aspects of sexuality and reproduction

A pregnant single woman (Roe) brought a class action challenging the constitutionality of the Texas criminal abortion laws, which proscribe procuring or attempting an abortion except on medical advice for the purpose of saving the mother's life. A licensed physician (Hallford), who had two state abortion prosecutions pending against him, was permitted to intervene. A childless married couple (the Does), the wife not being pregnant, separately attacked the laws, basing alleged injury on the future possibilities of contraceptive failure, pregnancy, unpreparedness for parenthood, and impairment of the wife's health. ..

After petitioners and other antiabortion protesters threatened to picket and demonstrate around a Florida abortion clinic, a state court permanently enjoined petitioners from blocking or interfering with public access to the clinic, and from physically abusing persons entering or leaving it. Later, when respondent clinic operators sought to broaden the injunction, the court found that access to the clinic was still being impeded, that petitioners' activities were having deleterious physical effects on patients and discouraging some potential patients from entering the clinic, and that doctors and clinic workers were being subjected to protests at their homes.

June 24, 2022

In 2007, Massachusetts amended its Reproductive Health Care Facilities Act, which had been enacted in 2000 to address clashes between abortion opponents and advocates of abortion rights outside clinics where abortions were performed. The amended version of the Act makes it a crime to knowingly stand on a “public way or sidewalk” within 35 feet of an entrance or driveway to any “reproductive health care facility,” defined as “a place, other than within or upon the grounds of a hospital, where abortions are offered or performed.”

Maternal Mortality Among Vulnerable US Communities

The 2.5 million members of NARAL Pro-Choice America fight for reproductive freedom for every body. Each day, we organize and mobilize to protect that freedom by fighting for access to abortion care, birth control, paid parental leave, and protections from pregnancy discrimination.

At issue are five provisions of the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act of 1982: § 3205, which requires that a woman seeking an abortion give her informed consent prior to the procedure, and specifies that she be provided with certain information at least 24 hours before the abortion is performed; § 3206, which mandates the informed consent of one parent for a minor to obtain an abortion, but provides a judicial bypass procedure; § 3209, which commands that, unless certain exceptions apply, a married woman seeking an abortion must sign a statement indicating that she has notified her husband; § 3203, which defines a "medical emergency" that will excuse compliance with the foregoing requirements; and §§ 3207(b), 3214(a), and 3214(f), which impose certain reporting requirements on facilities providing abortion services. Before any of the provisions took effect, the petitioners, five abortion clinics and a physician representing himself and a class of doctors who provide abortion services, brought this suit seeking a declaratory judgment that each of the provisions was unconstitutional on its face, as well as injunctive relief. The District Court held all the provisions unconstitutional and permanently enjoined their enforcement. The Court of Appeals affirmed in part and reversed in part, striking down the husband notification provision but upholding the others.

August 2014

August 17, 2022

SIECUS was founded in 1964 by Dr. Mary S. Calderone. A Medical Director at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Dr. Calderone became concerned about the lack of accurate information about sexuality available for both young people and adults. So at the age of 60, determined to live in a world in which sexuality was viewed as a natural and healthy part of life, Dr. Calderone founded SIECUS with Wallace Fulton, Reverend William Genne, Lester Kirkendall, Dr. Harold Lief, and Clark Vincent.

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Available through the Internet Archive

June 24, 2022

Note the links to relevant cases.

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