As Women’s History Month winds down, Milner Library would like to highlight some of the many resources documenting the critical role women have played in history, society, and the creation of scholarly and creative works. This is only a small sample of the resources available, but the hope is that readers will find it both inspiring and useful in their own work.
A historical snapshot on research by and about women, gender, and sexuality at Illinois State University can be found in the online Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program Research Symposia Collection. The collection includes posters, fliers, and programs from the first event held in 1996 through the 24.5th annual symposium held in 2021. There is also the online exhibit Underpinnings and Equal Terms: How the Suffrage Movement Changed American Women and American Women Changed the Nation which uses primary sources to show how women supported the suffrage movement through direct actions as well as through their work and scholarship.
The Archives Library Information Center for the National Archives has also created an extensive list of its own materials and outside resources related to women’s history. Resources are broken down into Bibliographies, African-American Women, Biographies, Politics and Women, Women’s Suffrage, Women in the Military, and Other Resources. The links go to both primary and secondary resources on a wide variety of topics and in many different formats.
As is often the case, the Library of Congress has made many valuable resources available online. Open Access visual materials can be found at the page Free to Use and Reuse: Women’s History Month, and the library has partnered with the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, National Archives, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, National Park Service, and National Endowment for the Humanities to create the Women’s History Month website. The library also offers a portal to their materials about American women through American Women: A Guide to Women’s History Resources at the Library of Congress.
Milner Library’s institutional repository, ISU ReD, also has the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Collection. If you have questions about scholarly communication in general or would like to make your materials more readily available, it is often possible to place pre-prints or even published articles and other materials in ISUReD. If you wish to discuss this further, please contact Milner Library’s Scholarly Communication Team at isured@ilstu.edu.
