Research Guides: Gender Studies: Primary Sources

Featured Resource

Archives of Sexuality & Gender: LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940

Includes newsletters, organizational papers, government documents, manuscripts, pamphlets, and other primary sources from the Lesbian Herstory Educational Foundation, Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, GLBT Historical Society, New York Public Library, and elsewhere.

This fully searchable collection enables students, educators, and researchers to thoroughly explore and make new connections in subjects such as LGBTQ history and activism, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, health, political science, policy studies, human rights, gender studies, and more.

About Primary Sources

What are primary sources?
Primary sources are original sources, in which witnesses or first recorders describe a time, person or event. They are the subjective interpretation of a witness to an event and serve as the materials historians use to analyze the past. Primary sources can either be the original document or published at a later date in electronic, microfilm and printed collections.

Use our Primary Sources guide to learn more.

Digitized Primary Source Collections at Queen's Library

Queen's University Library subscribes to several collections of primary source material relevant to Gender Studies, including the following:

Black Thought and Culture
Contains the full text of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writing by leading figures in African American life and culture.

British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries

Includes diaries, correspondence, journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters and more..., from 1500-1900.

Defining Gender, 1450-1910

Historical documents to support study and analysis of gender, leisure and consumer culture.

Food and Drink in History
From feast to famine, explore primary source material documenting the story of food and drink throughout history. The materials in this collection illustrate the deep links between food and identity, politics and power, gender, race and socio-economic status, as well as charting key issues around agriculture, nutrition and food production.

Gender Identity and Social Change
Primary sources documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations from the nineteenth century to the present. This expansive collection offers sources for the study of women's suffrage, the feminist movement, the men’s movement, employment, education, the body, the family, and government and politics.

Godey's Lady's Book

Digitized facsimile of an early American women's magazine which was intended to entertain, inform, and educate the women of America.

Mass Observation Online: British Social History, 1937-1972

Material from and about Mass Observation, the British social research organization.

Nineteenth Century Collections Online

A multi-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the long nineteenth century. Collections include Women: Transnational Networks, which “focuses on issues at the intersection of gender and class from the late-eighteenth century to the era of suffrage in the early-twentieth century, all through a transnational perspective. The collection contains deep information on European and North American movements, but also expands its scope to include collections from other regions.”

North American Women's Drama

Plays, biographical, production, and theatrical information.

Sex & Sexuality
Sex & Sexuality aims to provide an insight into the wide-ranging breadth and experience of human sexuality from all angles, for example scientific, historical attitudes, sexuality, and sexual behaviours.

Social Theory

Extensive range of influential writings representing major social sciences theorists from the eighteenth century to the present day.

Vogue Archive
A complete searchable archive of American Vogue, from the first issue in 1892 to the current month, reproduced in high-resolution color page images.

Women and Social Movements in the United States 1600-2000
Primary and secondary documents, images, a chronology of U.S. women's history and more...

Further Primary Source Collections and Resources

ACT UP Oral History Project
An archive of 187 interviews with members of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, New York.

Digital Transgender Archive
The purpose of the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is to increase the accessibility of transgender history by providing an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world. Based in Boston, Massachusetts at Northeastern University, the DTA is an international collaboration among more than sixty colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, public libraries, and private collections.

Discovering American Women's History Online
This database provides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States. These diverse collections range from Ancestral Pueblo pottery to Katrina Thomas's photographs of ethnic weddings from the late 20th century.

Independent Voices
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.

Women Working, 1800-1930
Digital exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. Working conditions, workplace regulations, home life, costs of living, commerce, recreation, health and hygiene, and social issues are among the issues documented in this online research collection from Harvard University.

Queer Zine Archive Project
First launched in November 2003, the mission of the Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) is to "establish a "living history" archive of past and present queer zines and to encourage current and emerging zine publishers to continue to create."

Print Collections at Queen's

W. D. Jordan Rare Books & Special Collections

Queen's Archives

Kingston Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer 2 Spirited + Collection

Stauffer Library:

Public Women, Public Words : A Documentary History of American Feminism (1997)
REF HQ1410.K444 1997

A 3 volume set that reproduces primary documents--speeches, essays, letters--charting the development of feminism. Periods covered: Beginnings to 1900; 1900-1960; 1960 to late 1990s.