About Women and Social Movements

1. About the Web Site

This Web site is intended to serve as a resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women's history. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, the site seeks to advance scholarly debates and understanding of U.S. history at the same time that it makes the insights of women's history accessible to teachers and students at universities, colleges, and high schools. We are an online journal and publish new issues twice a year, in March and September. The site is available to academic libraries by subscription or purchase in either the Basic or the Scholar's edition.

Women and Social Movements: Basic Edition contains the following resources:

  • 91 document projects that interpret and present documents, most of which are not otherwise available online. Each document project poses an interpretive question and provides a collection of documents that address the question. Altogether these document projects provide more than 3,600 documents, more than 1,000 images, and 900 links to other websites. They demonstrate that historical analysis is an interpretive process based on documents. Viewers of the site are encouraged to participate in that interpretive process. We usually add six new document projects or archives annually. Women and Social Movements is also now accepting submissions of document projects for consideration for online publication.
  • More than 41,000 pages of sources pertaining to Women and Social Movements. These materials have been selected by the Editors for their relevance to the focus of the website. We add 5,000 additional pages of sources annually. For a listing of full-text sources, go to Browse Sources and click on Full Text Primary Sources.
  • A dictionary of social movements and organizations.
  • A chronology of U.S. Women's History.
  • Teaching Tools with lesson ideas and document-based questions related to the website's document projects.
  • Regularly-published news from the archives about primary sources in U.S. Women's History.

Women and Social Movements: Scholar's Edition contains all of these resources plus:

  • A digital archive, consisting of 90,000 pages of publications of federal, state, and local Commissions on the Status of Women between 1961 and 2005.
  • An online edition of the five-volume biographical dictionary, Notable American Women (1971-2004).
We implemented a new architecture for the Web Site in October 2008. The URL for the old website remains http://asp6new.alexanderstreet.com/wasm/wasm.index.html.

2. How to Cite Sources from WASM

Because WASM is accessible through the servers of subscribing libraries, the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) will vary, depending on the library, and the URL citation will also vary depending on the library.

We therefore recommend that users include the following elements in their citations:

  • author
  • title of document (for e.g. a speech or a newspaper article)
  • author and title of original source (for eg. a newspaper or a book).
  • original publication date
  • (If in a WASM document project or document archive, author and title of the project or archive.)
  • in Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, eds., Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
  • accessed through [name of subscribing library]
  • at [URL of home page of subscribing library]
  • accessed [give date].

3. Submission Guidelines

Women and Social Movements welcomes proposals for online document projects. Co-directors Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin draw on a Board of Editors who referee submissions and offer support to prospective author/editors.

Prospective submissions should be built around primary sources addressing a concrete question concerning some aspect of women and social movements in the United States. Ideally the project question should address issues raised in relevant secondary literature. The project should include a brief introductory essay with endnotes and about 20-30 primary source documents (texts, images, audio or video) with headnotes that address the central question and annotations that identify obscure references within the documents. The project should also include a bibliography and a set of related WWW links. Author/editors of projects accepted for publication on the website will also need to secure permission for the publication of any copyrighted material. Staff of the Women and Social Movements website will provide support in this process.

In March 2009 we introduced a new format – the document archive. In document archives authors can present larger groups of documents relatively unmediated by interpretation. By publishing a blend of document projects and document archives, we hope to make available an even wider array of new interpretations and new documents in U.S. Women's History. Prospective authors should contact the editors at the outset of their work to discuss whether they would like to prepare a proposal for a document project or a document archive.

Because so much work is involved in preparing a web-based document project, and there are limited venues for publication of such work, we ask prospective contributors initially to submit a 3-5 page abstract noting the project's central question, its connection to relevant historiography, and the main primary sources to be employed. In addition we ask prospective authors to submit an annotated list of documents likely to be included in the project. Staff at the website and members of the editorial board will offer responses and assistance to prospective contributors. We send proposals and related lists of documents out for double-blind peer review. Based on reviewers’ comments, we will accept a proposal, urge the author to revise and resubmit the proposal, or decide not to move forward with the proposal.

We encourage prospective contributors to contact Tom Dublin, co-editor, by email to discuss their proposals before submitting them. All submissions must be electronic—on diskettes, zip disks, cd-roms, or via email or email attachments. We find it helpful to have considerable email exchange during the proposal preparation process and during work on the project because of the unique demands of the document project genre.

Professor Jay Kleinberg of Brunel University has written an article describing her experience preparing a document project for WASM and has kindly permitted us to mount the piece here for prospective contributors. You may find her discussion helpful if you are anticipating preparing your own document project

4. About the Women's Commission Database

In December 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Eleanor Roosevelt to chair the President's Commission on the Status of Women, a bipartisan organization whose goal was to examine discrimination against women in the United States and to study and make recommendations on policies designed to enable women to fulfill their potential in American life. When the President's Commission disbanded in 1963, it issued a series of final reports documenting, among other topics, labor policies and practices relating to women, educational opportunities available to women, the legal status of women in American law, and services available to women in the realms of training, counseling, and child care. In addition, the commission recommended that states and localities establish their own commissions on the status of women to continue research and advocacy to promote the equality of women in all aspects of American social and political life. Today, there are approximately 270 state and local women's commissions around the United States.

These federal, state, and local commissions have produced a wealth of primary materials documenting conditions in the lives of American women over the second half of the twentieth century. Reports and publications issued by these commissions provide information at a level of depth that is not common in other primary materials available for this time period. However, these publications have not been widely accessible, and never before have they been indexed and made searchable. Our goal with the Women's Commission Reports is to compile in one place, for the first time, the complete text of virtually every report on the status of women issued by these bodies during this time period. Release 5 (October 2008) includes 72,000 pages of publications. When complete (in September 2009), the database will provide 90,000 pages of materials documenting women's issues over more than four decades in all fifty states and territories.

The database also includes the full text of the Status of Women in the States reports published by the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR). Between 1996 and 2004, the IWPR published reports documenting the status of women in each of the fifty states. Individual copies of these reports are also available from the IWPR directly. More information can be found on the IWPR's website: http://www.iwpr.org.

We have also published six essays to help users understand the context for the emergence of state and local commissions, the construction of the database, and interpretive uses to which these resources can be put. The following essays are accessible through the Scholar's Edition:

Thomas Dublin, "Constructing the Database of Commissions on the Status of Women"

Kathleen Laughlin, "Introduction to the Women and Social Movements State Commissions Database"

Dorothy Sue Cobble, "The Labor Feminist Origins of the U.S. Commissions on the Status of Women"

Marjorie Spruill, "The Conservative Challenge to Feminist Influence on State Commissions on the Status of Women"

Cynthia Harrison, "State Commissions and Economic Security for Women"

Carrie Baker, "How Are Issues Related to Sexuality Treated in Publications of Commissions on the Status of Women?"

In addition to providing the full text of these materials, Alexander Street's Semantic Indexing allows the information contained in the reports to be accessed and analyzed in ways never before possible. Subjects indexed include affirmative action, crime and violence, education, economics, housing, childcare, health services, abortion, pornography, language, jobs, maternity leave, politics, law, disability, minority rights, and the image of women, among many others. Some of the most valuable information in the collection is statistical and is captured in charts, graphs, and tables, and users can search the information contained therein by x- and y-axes. Moreover, reports can be searched across geography and time, allowing users to compare data at different points in time or across different states.

5. Editorial Policy

A note on transcription:

To prepare our key-entered transcriptions of documents we begin with photocopies of the original documents, whether archival manuscripts or published works. We transcribe originals as they appear and do not correct errors in spelling or non-standard punctuation except in the case of typographical errors in printed sources or insignificant errors in manuscript sources. Errors have not been noted with "[sic]" except in cases where recognition of the error illuminates the document. We have only added words occasionally to clarify the meaning of an obscure passage and have always used brackets [ ] on such occasions. We have always used ellipses to indicate places where we have excerpted portions from a longer document. Where we have deleted a paragraph or more, we have inserted asterisks to mark this editing. We have also added signatures in brackets if the original document was an internal copy of a letter and as such did not have a signature.

We add 5,000 pages of new full-text sources annually. For the first three years these documents included books, pamphlets, and other publications focusing on "One Hundred Years of the Struggle for Woman Suffrage, 1830-1930." In 2007 we completed a run of the minutes of the annual national meetings of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. In September 2009 we completed a selection of 8,000 pages of publications of the League of Women Voters, 1920-2000.

6. Editorial Board

  • Harriet Alonso, The City College of New York, CUNY
  • Joyce Antler, Brandeis University
  • Karen Anderson, University of Arizona
  • Sherri Barnes, University of California Santa Barbara
  • Elsa Barkley Brown, University of Maryland
  • Victoria Brown, Grinnell College
  • Lara Campbell, Simon Fraser University
  • Patricia Cleary, California State University at Long Beach
  • Carol Coburn, Avila University
  • Kayo Denda, Rutgers University
  • Hasia Diner, New York University
  • Judith Ezekiel, University of Toulouse
  • Nancy Page Fernandez, California State Polytechnic University at Pomona
  • Estelle Freedman, Stanford University
  • Jennifer Frost, The University of Auckland
  • Stephanie Gilmore, Dickinson College
  • Joanne Goodwin, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
  • Nancy Hewitt, Rutgers University
  • Darlene Clark Hine, Northwestern University
  • Linda Janke, Anoka-Ramsey Community College
  • Nancy Janovicek, University of Calgary
  • S.J. Kleinberg, Brunel University
  • Rui Kohiyama, Tokyo Woman's Christian University
  • Shira Kohn, New York University
  • Rachel Kranson, New York University
  • Carol Lasser, Oberlin College
  • Kathleen Laughlin, Metropolitan State University
  • Kriste Lindenmeyer, University of Maryland Baltimore County
  • Jennifer Mittelstadt, Pennsylvania State University
  • Marjorie Murphy, Swarthmore College
  • Tamara Myers, University of British Columbia
  • Katherine Osburn, Tennessee Technological University
  • Elisabeth Perry, St. Louis University
  • Janice C. Reiff, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Joan Sangster, Trent University
  • Melanie Shell-Weiss, Johns Hopkins University
  • Marjorie Spruill, University of South Carolina
  • Laura Westhoff, University of Missouri, St. Louis
  • Cynthia Wright, University of Toronto
  • Tanya Zanish-Belcher, Iowa State University

Special Editors

7. Project Staff

Kathryn Kish Sklar, co-editor of the web site, is Distinguished Bartle Professor of History and Co-Director of the for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at the State University of New York at Binghamton. In 2005-2006 she was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900 (1995), and other books and articles on women and social movements. Her first book, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (1973), analyzed how women reshaped gender identities and gender relationships in the antebellum era. Both Catharine Beecher and Florence Kelley were awarded the Berkshire Prize. She is currently completing a study of women and social movements in the Progressive era, 1900-1930.

Thomas Dublin is co-editor of the web site. He serves as Professor of History and Co-Director of the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the author or editor of eight books including Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (1979), winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Merle Curti Award. His latest book, The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century, co-authored with Walter Licht, received the 2006 Merle Curti Award for Social History and the Philip S. Klein Prize.

Aaron Shaughnessy is the webmaster for WASM. He is working toward his doctorate in U.S. Gender History at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is an editorial assistant for at the Women and Social Movements website at the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender.

Denise Ireton is the Managing Editor of the digital archive, "Women's International Agendas, 1840-2010." She is a doctoral student at SUNY Binghamton who is planning to write a dissertation on the international dimensions of U.S. Women's History.

Jessie Frazier is Project Coordinator on the digital archive, "Women's International Agendas, 1840-2000." She is a doctoral student at SUNY Binghamton planning to write a dissertation in U.S. Women's History.

Carol Linskey is Project Coordinator on the digital archive, "Women's International Agendas, 1840-2000." She is an advanced doctoral student in U.S. Women's History at SUNY Binghamton and is working on her dissertation, "American Internationalism and the Work of Dorothy Kenyon, 1933-1954."

8. Project Contributors

Click here for details of contributors.

9. History of the Web Site

The website that appears here under the joint imprint of the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and Alexander Street Press of Alexandria, Virginia, began in a senior seminar that Kathryn Sklar taught at the SUNY Binghamton in the Spring of 1997. The course was designed to introduce advanced undergraduates to the excitement of discovering, editing, and analyzing historical documents that focus on women and social movements in American history. The students produced portions of what became the website's first document projects in December 1997.

When the format of documentary projects proved extremely well matched to the new internet media, Thomas Dublin, her colleague at SUNY Binghamton, joined her to create an innovative website for the documentary projects, adding his knowledge of U.S. women's history and his experience with the use of computers in historical research. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and later from Houghton Mifflin and ProQuest Information and Learning, the Women and Social Movements website grew rapidly. In 2001, with a second NEH grant, we began a collaboration with eleven faculty from other colleges and universities around the country. By the end of 2002 the website offered 43 documentary projects that interpreted about 1000 documents ranging from 1775 to 2000. The site attracted about 30,000 viewers a month from more than ninety countries. Yet two aspects of the website were not sustainable: the intensive labor needed to transform student work into authoritative scholarly analysis; and the initial sources of the site's funding.

This combination of success and challenges prompted us to reconceive the Women and Social Movements website in the Spring of 2002. Convinced that the technology and the format of the website were ideally matched to generate new knowledge in U.S. Women's History, we decided to encourage faculty and advanced graduate students to create document projects for the site. That effort was remarkably successful; for more than two years we published regular additions to the website from a wide range of scholars drawing on their specialized knowledge of women and social movements to create documentary projects for the site. We established an Editorial Board for the website as well as guidelines for submissions with blind peer review. In the Spring of 2002 we also began discussions with Stephen Rhind-Tutt of Alexander Street Press, which resulted in our decision to publish jointly with ASP. This relationship has provided stability for the website and facilitated its expansion.

In March 2004 we became a quarterly online journal and for five years added new document projects quarterly, publishing on average eight new projects annually. Because each issue grew in size, in 2009 we changed to a semi-annual publication schedule to give ourselves time to prepare the extensive material that now flowed into WASM. In addition to document projects, with each issue we also publish digitized versions of books and pamphlets related to women and social movements in the U.S. expanding the site by about 5,000 pages a year. Initially these volumes focused on one hundred years of the woman suffrage movement, 1830-1930, including the six volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage (1881-1922) edited by Stanton, Anthony, and other leaders of the woman suffrage movement and all the proceedings of the three national conventions of anti-slavery women held in the 1830s and the national woman's rights conventions held between 1848 and 1869. Alexander Street Press has provided detailed semantic indexing and database searching for these and other resources on the site, greatly improving its scholarly utility. A Dictionary of Social Movements and a Chronology of U.S. Women's History, both especially prepared for the website, provide users unique subject access to both document projects and full-text sources on the site. We also publish book reviews under the editorial direction of Professor Jeanne Petit of Hope College and website reviews edited by Melanie Shell-Weiss of Johns Hopkins University.

In addition to the continuing publication of new document projects and digitization of additional sources, we are committed to expanding the Teaching Tools component of the website. Since January 2001 we have published lesson ideas and document-based questions drawing on the website's rich collection of document projects. These teaching tools—now numbering 43 in March 2009—are now fully indexed and thus are more accessible than in the past. In the fall of 2009 we are introducing the Women and Social Movements BLOG, which will provide a venue for the discussion of teaching and research strategies that use online resources.

In March 2007 we introduced the new, expanded Women and Social Movements in the United States: Scholar's Edition. The new expansion of the site includes the Women's Commissions Collection. It also includes Harvard University Press's landmark five-volume Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, available for the first time in electronic form. Women and Social Movements in the United States: Scholar's Edition is available as an upgrade to the Basic Edition. We are currently working on a major new digital archive, "Women's International Agendas, 1840-2000," which will contain 150,000 pages of published and manuscript resources generated by women's international activism since 1840. That new resource will be available by subscription to academic libraries in mid-2010.

Kathryn Sklar and Thomas Dublin will continue to serve as co-editors of the website and shape its content. Along with high scholarly standards, Alexander Street Press brings unique talents to the technical dimensions of the project. They have developed the site's new search engine, database, semantic (keyword) indexing and design.

By adding new document projects and extensive full-text sources to the database annually, we plan to create a rich and continually expanding resource for the ongoing study of U.S. Women's History.

10. Reviews

Click here for reviews about the database.

11. Permissions

Click here for permissions granted for copyrighted materials uses on the web site.

12. About the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender

Click here to go to the web site of the Center where our editorial office is housed.

13. Errata

Please report any errata to the editor at the address at the bottom of this document. There are no known errata at this time.

14. Technical Support

You can contact us by:

When reporting a problem please include your customer name, e-mail address, phone number, domain name or IP address and that of your web proxy server if used.

15. Subscription and Free Trial Information

Women and Social Movements: Basic Edition and Scholar's Edition are available for one-time purchase of perpetual access, or as an annual subscription. Please contact us at sales@alexanderstreet.com if you wish to begin a subscription or to request a free 30-day trial.

16. Copyright

All materials in Women and Social Movements are protected under U.S. and International Copyright Law. Fair use under the law permits reproduction of single copies for personal research and private use. Further transmission, reproduction, or presentation of protected items requires the written permission of the copyright owners.

17. Archiving

Texts produced for Women and Social Movements are considered research materials and receive the same level of stewardship as books, paper documents, and photographs. Copies of the database are given to all purchasing institutions, thereby ensuring that the materials are available to subsequent generations.

18. Cataloging Records

MARC records will be available for this collection soon. Records will point to each full text book, series, or document project. This will enable patrons to link directly from a public access catalog to all documents pertaining to that publication.

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