James P. Adams Library: Gender & Women's Studies: Finding Primary Sources

Go to the Source!

In Gender and Women's Studies research, primary sources are created by the person, group, or organization you are studying, or in some contexts in direct response to that person within their time. As you are studying contemporary activists one of the best ways you can get started is to find good examples of what your activist has said, written, created or done that you can use in answering the questions you must address in your presentation.

Ways to get started:

Go directly to their website - if this person performs and is involved with activism, do they have multiple sites? Take note of what they present in various spaces they present themselves in,
Find full videos, with transcripts, of their speeches, presentations or performances,
Find good-quality images of their art,
Look for full interviews - don't take single decontextualized quotes from unreliable sources!

Local Collections

Feminist Theory Archive - Brown University
Queer.Archive.Work Library
Queer.Archive.Work’s physical reading room in Providence houses a non-circulating collection of zines, books, and objects, open to all for research and inspiration. Contributions to the growing collection are welcomed, especially works produced on-site at QAW.
Rhode Island Feminist Theatre Records, 1973-1984 - Brown University
Women - Rhode Island State Archives

Digital Archives & Collections

Chicana por mi Raza
Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective is a group of researchers, educators, students, archivists and technologists dedicated to preserving imperiled Chicanx and Latinx histories of the long Civil Rights Era.
CWLU Herstory Project
The CWLU was the most significant of the socialist feminist women’s unions established during the “second wave” feminist movement. CWLU was formed in 1969 and played a leading role in the women’s liberation movement in Chicago during the 1970s. CWLU recognized that the liberation of women was not possible unless it also fought against racism and capitalism, and for gay and lesbian liberation.
Feminist Freedom Warriors
Feminist Freedom Warriors (FFW) is a digital video archive documenting cross-generational conversations about justice, politics and hope with feminist scholar-activists. This collaborative effort features Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Linda Carty in conversation with comrades and sisters in struggle, with a team of graduate and undergraduate students providing creative, research, and technical assistance.
Global Feminisms Project
The Global Feminisms Project (GFP) collects interviews with women's movement activists and women's studies scholars in sites around the world. The archive includes over seventy interviews with women from Brazil, China, India, Nicaragua, Poland, Russia, and the United States.
Independent Voices
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Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
National Women's History Museum
Our mission is to tell the stories of women who transformed our nation. We will do that through a growing state-of-the-art online presence and a future physical museum to educate, inspire, empower, shape the future, and provide a complete view of American history.
Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture
The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture in Duke's Rubenstein Library acquires, preserves and makes available to a large population of researchers published and unpublished materials that reflect the public and private lives of women, past and present.
The Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America
Guides to collections.
Voices of Feminism Oral History Project
The Voices of Feminism Oral History Project documents the persistence and diversity of organizing for women in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century. Narrators include labor, peace, and anti-racism activists; artists and writers; lesbian rights advocates; grassroots anti-violence and anti-poverty organizers; and women of color reproductive justice leaders. Interviews average 5-6 hours and cover childhood, personal life, and political work.
Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party
This collection includes 448 digitized photographs selected from approximately 2,650 print photographs in the Records of the National Woman's Party, a collection of more than 438,000 items, housed in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. The images span from 1875 to 1938 but largely were created in the years between 1913 and 1922. The images depict the tactics used by the militant wing of the suffrage movement in the United States—including picketing, petitioning, pageants, parades and demonstrations, hunger strikes and imprisonment---as well as individual portraits of organization leaders and members. The photographs document the National Woman's Party's push for ratification of the 19th Amendment as well as its later efforts for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.