Spotlight on online resources for International Women’s Day

The library has a wide variety of online resources that celebrate the contributions of women and gender diverse people, and that look at the issues that impact women’s lives. Looking for material to add to your syllabus, sources to cite in your assignments, or just a good read? Check out some of these databases! If you’re off campus, you’ll be prompted to log in with your CUNY login when you click on any of the links below.

Women and Social Movements in the United States,1600-2000 includes primary and secondary sources that help us understand women’s history in the United States, and specifically the contributions that women have made to social movements. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools. In addition to regular search tools, you can browse this collection by person or social movement. And, explore curated sets of primary sources that can support your research or teaching, such Writings by Black Women Suffragists, 1831-1965, which includes more than 1,900 items written by about 150 Black women suffragists.

North American Women’s Drama contains 1,517 plays by 330 playwrights. Written by women in the United States and Canada from Colonial times to the present, many of these works are rare, hard to find, or out of print. Almost a quarter of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays. 

Gale OneFile: Contemporary Women’s Issues provides information on issues that impact women around the globe. I love how Gale OneFile includes a topic finder that helps visualize connections between material included in my search results; clicking on “topic finder” on the home screen takes me to a search box that will provide me with a visual depiction of my search results, for example from this search for “maternal health”:

This image shows the results of a topic finder search for "maternal health" in the database Gale OneFile: Contemporary Women’s Issues. Colored bubles represent different sub-topics, including child health, mental health, medical care, maternal mortality, weekly new research, pregnant women, and public health.

Gale OneFile: Gender Studies includes material about gender studies, family and marital issues, and more. This database also provides the visually-based topic finder; this time, I started my search instead with the Subject Guides and searched for “health,” which helped me find subject guides for Personal Care Products and Wellness Programs. There’s so much to explore in these databases.