Collaborations: Documenting the Multiplicity of Women's Reform Activities

The Libraries are very pleased to make available to the Brandeis community Alexander Street Press's Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 , which examines perspectives on women's social movements from colonial America to the 21st century. Developed and edited by Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar of SUNY Binghamton, this electronic resource presents a continuously expanding compilation of books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies that will prove fascinating and invaluable to scholars, teachers, and students from a wide spectrum of disciplines. Among the fourteen distinguished scholars comprising the editorial board is Joyce Antler, the Samuel Lane Professor of American Jewish History and Culture in American Studies at Brandeis University.

Document projects form the core of this database and are compiled by leading scholars in women's social history. The projects span the years 1780 through 1994 and range from the Ladies Association of Philadelphia to immigrant textile workers to the Guerrilla Girls. Each peer-reviewed project poses central interpretative issues and provides 20 to 50 primary documents central to addressing these questions. These projects include introductory materials, annotations of the primary documents, a bibliography, and a list of related Web links. Women and Social Movements launched with 50 such projects and will add ten or more each year.

The rapidly growing collection of primary documents presently includes over 5,000 advertisements, books, chapters from books, diaries, images, legal papers, letters, speeches, and various texts that can be sorted by year, author, or title. Documents now available include The History of Woman Suffrage (6 volumes, 1881-1922; click here for vol. 1); proceedings of national conventions of female anti-slavery societies in the 1830s;
proceedings of women's rights conventions in the 1850s and 1860s; annual
reports of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union; and local and national
histories of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. Sorting by year provides a particularly useful historical overview of the breadth of this collection, including thumbnails of the images. Many of the documents contain introductions and annotations.

The list of social movements, sortable by name or year, presently stands at 90 entries. Each entry includes a brief description of the movement followed by links (as appropriate) to documents authored by the organization, documents discussing the organization, and details about the organization.

Teaching tools include lesson plans, which Brandeis students may find particularly useful for focusing on a topic for a research project and for quick linking to pertinent primary resources detailed in the plans.

Women and Social Movements offers several types of well-designed search screens that approach subjects from varied angles and levels of sophistication. There are both simple and advanced search modes, with many options for taking full advantage of the detailed indexing fields, such as sources, authors, and movements.

The list of sources provides a bibliography of all the publications cited in the resource. Various sorting options allow for listings by title, year, author, type of publication, and full-text only. In addition, links in the entries connect directly to the sources and provide extensive bibliographic details and often information on the authors.

Faculty will be delighted by the persistent links that consistently run through all levels of this resource, making direct connections to specific readings easy to create on WebCT pages. Moreover, users can download, print, or e-mail documents. Bibliographic records for all the publications included in Women and Social Movements will soon appear in LOUIS.

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