Women in European History

Encyclopedias

• Encyclopedia of European Social History
  Available online.
  See volume 1 for an entry on Gender Theory as well as entries on different countries and regions. See volume 3 for entries on Gender and Popular Protests and on Prostitution. Volume 4 is completely dedicated to gender issues.
• Political and Historical Encyclopedia of Women
  1 volume, 1st floor, Falvey Library, Reference Stacks: REF HQ1236.5.E85 E52 2003
  Great overview chapters about women in different European countries, such as Women in Revolutionary Russia, 1861-1926, Women in the German Revolution: Rosa Luxemburg and the Workers' Councils, and Women in Vichy France. The catalog record has a complete table of contents.
• International Encyclopedia of Women's Suffrage
  1 volume, 1st floor, Falvey Library, Reference Stacks: REF JF851 .H28 2000
• Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History
  Available online.  See entry on Women in the Labor Force.
• Fashion, Costume, and Culture: Clothing, Headwear, Body Decorations, and Footwear through the Ages
  Available online.

Biographical Information

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  A reference work providing 50,000 specially-written signed biographies of the men and women who shaped all aspects of the British past, from the earliest times to the end of the year 2000. Biographies include portraits, references to authoritative book-length biographies and names of archives were applicable. Only deceased biographical subjects are included.
• Current Biography Plus Illustrated
  Contains the full text and all the images of the 23,000 biographies and obituaries of artists, politicians, business people, journalists, actors, writers, sports figures, scientists, and other people prominent in the news that have appeared in Current Biography Yearbook since 1940 and a number of other biographical dictionaries. Includes links to obituaries as well as to books and articles by and about the subject.
• Women in World History. A Biographical Encyclopedia
  17 volumes, 1st floor, Falvey Library, Reference Stacks: REF HQ1115 .W6 1999
• Encyclopedia of World Biography
  Includes entries of approximately 7,000 biographies on notables from every part of the world and from all time periods.

Published biographies and autobiographies can be found in the Library's catalog.

Biographies can be found via a subject search:  "luxemburg rosa"
Autobiographies can be found via an author search: luxemburg, rosa

Biographies and Autobiographies not owned by the Library can be found via WorldCat. The Borrow from another library link in the WorldCat records will generate an interlibrary loan form and the Library will loan the book from another library.

Scholarly Literature

Critical articles published in scholarly history journals can be found through a variety of online journal indexes to which the Library subscribes. See the index/database description for period and/or geographical scope. Good starting points are:

• Historical Abstracts
  An annotated reference guide to the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present. Includes journal articles, book reviews and dissertations.
• American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies
  Provides information on East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. Some of the many subjects covered include: anthropology, culture & the arts, economics, education, and geography. Sources indexed include journals, books, dissertations, online resources and selected government publications published in the U.S. and Canada.
• GenderWatch
  A full text database of unique and diverse publications that focus on how gender impacts a broad spectrum of subject areas.
• Cambridge Histories Online
  A complete collection of Cambridge histories including series such as The Cambridge Social History of Britain (3 vols.), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe (8 vols.), and The Cambridge History of Russia (3 vols.).
• Dissertations and Theses Full Text
  A comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses with over 2.4 million dissertations and theses included from around the world. Each dissertation published since July 1980 includes a 350-word abstract written by the author. Bibliographic citations are available for dissertations dating from 1637, and full text is available from 1997 on.
• Catalog
  Books and book chapters in the Library's print collection are another source of scholarly literature. Books that are not owned by the Library can be found via WorldCat.

Examples:
Subject search:  "sex role" AND "great britain"
Subject search:  women AND (russia OR soviet) AND history
Subject search:  "women and socialism"
Keyword search:  women AND vichy
Subject search:  "women's clothing europe history"
Subject search:  suffrage AND ireland

For further indexes of scholarly journals please consult the Subject Guides page on the Library’s homepage or ask for advice.

Primary Sources

The Library owns a number of digital collection that may contain useful primary sources. Good starting points are:

• British Periodicals
  The database consists of more than 160 journals spanning the late 17th through early 20th centuries, and covering a range of topics such as literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts and the social sciences. This resource has facsimile page images and searchable full text for nearly 500 British periodicals published.
• Poole's Plus
  A web edition of Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, 1802-1906, covering 479 American and English periodicals of the 19th century.
• The Times of London
  A complete archive from 1785 to 1985.
• The Gerritsen collection of Aletta H. Jacobs, 1543-1945
  Trial will last ONLY until March 5, 2009. Positive or negative feedback will be welcome if you use this collection.
  The collection consists of 265 periodicals, including The Suffragist (1913-21) and The Women's Protest Against Woman Suffrage (1912-18) and 4,471 monographs and pamphlets tracing suffragism in the English-speaking world. .
  For a more detailed description, click here.
• Current Digest of the (Post-)Soviet Press
  CDPSP is a comprehensive retrospective digest of the news presented to the Soviet and Russian public for more than a half-century, from the beginnings of the Cold War through the emergence of Russia in the new balance of power. It consists of a selection of Russian-language press materials, translated into English.
• Women Writers Project, 1400-1850
  Full-text pre 1850 women's writing in English, or in English translation. Covers various genres and issues.
• Primary sources, such as autobiographies, diaries and letters can also be found via the Library's catalog. Include keywords that describe primary sources such as correspondence, diaries or sources in the search box. WorldCat may be used to identify primary sources published in books not owned by the Library. Titles identified with the help of WorldCat can be requested through interlibrary loan. 

  Examples:
  britain AND suffrage AND sources
  luxemburg AND rosa AND correspondence
  Author search: "pfeiffer ida"
  Author search: "wollstonecraft mary"
  "personal narratives" AND women AND war AND 1918
  

Style Guides and Citation Management Software

• Research and Documentation Online.
  Guide to the major documentation styles
• Chicago Manual of Style Quick Guide
  Made available free online by Chicago University Press.
• Using Chicago Style to Cite and Document Sources
  (excerpted from Online! A Reference Guide to Using Internet Sources by Andrew Harnack and Eugene Kleppinger).
• The Chicago Manual of Style
  Available online and in print.
  Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1993.
  Information desk Z253.U69 2003
• RefWorks
  Never type a bibliography again! RefWorks will help you easily gather, manage, and store bibliographic citations for all types of information, as well as generate footnotes and bibliographies.