• How to Find Your Suffragette Ancestors
• Black Feminism Introductory Research Guide
• Women's History Month: Researching with NYPL's E-Resources
• Finding Wonder Women at the Library: Online Biographies and Encyclopedias
• Women's and Gender Studies: A Research Guide
• Published Family Histories: An Undertapped Resource
• How to Research a Report for Women's History Month

Crowdsourcing Projects

Don’t confine yourself to learning about women’s history—here’s your chance to actively contribute to it! These crowd-sourcing projects invite the general public to transcribe records relating to women’s history and to share their own knowledge—including any information learned by using one of the guides listed above—of the women in their families or local communities. 
When your grandchildren ask you what you did during the terrible COVID-19 period, you can tell them you did more than just live through history—you helped make it available to everyone.

• Quarantine Pastimes: Help Transcribe Women’s Rights History

  • Joint project of the Women’s Rights National Historical Park and the Library of Congress’ By the People project Suffrage: Women Fight for the Vote

  • Transcription can be done any time, but Women’s Rights National Historical Park’s Community Volunteer Ambassador Audrey DeAngelis will host a “Transcription Chat” each Tuesday from 1 to 4 pm through the end of May.

  • For more information or to sign up for this event, contact Audrey DeAngelis at Audrey_DeAngelis@partner.nps.gov.

• Where Women Made History, National Trust for Historical Preservation

• Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement, Binghamton University’s Center for the Historical Study of Gender and Women

 

NYPL Blogs

In addition to research guides, NYPL librarians, curators and scholars regularly publish blog posts to highlight women represented in the Library’s collections. Some of these are collected on our Women’s History Month blog channel—to make sure you don’t miss any future Women’s History Month blogs, you can subscribe to our RSS Feed here.

The list below is just a small sampling of the many other library blogs relating to women (in chronological order starting with the most recent). 

• 2020 Bernstein Awards Finalist Spotlight: 'She Said’ by Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey
• Masks are the New Mittens
• Inspired by Madam C.J. Walker? Be You Own Self Made Boss
• April Fooling With Suffragists a Century Ago—And How to Find Out if Your Ancestors Were Involved With the Suffrage Movement
• Catherine Latimer: The New York Public Library's First Black Librarian
• 2020 Bernstein Awards Finalist Spotlight: 'No Visible Bruises’ by Rachel Louise Snyder
• See It, Be It: Inspiring Picture Books about Women Scientists
• Forgotten History: Books to Honor Women's Contributions to Science
• Remembering Mary Higgins Clark
• Interview: Kristin O'Donnell Tubb Returns With a New Library Mystery
• San Juan Hill and the Black Nurses of the Stillman Settlement
• Celebrating Emily Dickinson, Poetry's Favorite "Nobody"
• Stories of Courage: March Forward, Girl
• The Black Feminist Project at the Bronx Library Center
• Remembering Jessye Norman
• To the Beat of Her Own Drum: Ladies of the Beat Generation
• Celebrating the City's First Puerto Rican Librarian, Pura Belpré
• Where to Start with Zora Neale Hurston
• Frontier Feminist Miriam Michelson: An Interview with Lori Harrison-Kahan
• Saddle Up For Fierce Female Westerns!
• BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez: Celebrating the Work of an Iconic Wordsmith and Activist
• The New York Public Library Honors the Life of Toni Morrison
• Favorite Quotes: Empowering Women by Louise Hay
• Summer Reading 2019: A Women's Literary World Cup
• 100 Years of Women's Suffrage: The Long Road to Ratification
• Women Who Fight Back with Poetry
• In the Weeds: The History of Botanical Illustration and the Work of Anna Atkins
• The Oprah Effect: The Lasting Power of Oprah and the Oprah Book Club
• Yiddish Drama Queen: Jennie Goldstein in Pictures
• Annie Proulx’s Visibility through Violence 
• Women in Translation Month: Yiddish

NYPL Digital Collections

Women’s history is richly represented in the Library’s growing collection of digitized material, available to everyone at home before.

Among the highlights are two collections that document the contributions of feminists that history has often overlooked. Noted Negro women: their triumphs and activities includes portraits from an 1893 book of that title which compiled the biographies of notable African American women, many of whom have been almost entirely forgotten.

The Schwimmer-Lloyd Collection features photographs of annual congresses held by the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), a feminist organization that has largely escaped Americans' notice, despite its signficant influence on the U.S. suffrage movement. The digitized photographs represent only a small fraction of the extensive Schwimmer-Lloyd Collection available on-site. You can search the Digital Collections by keyword, or browse by women-specific topics and collections, including the following:

Topics

• Women
• Women’s suffrage
• African American women
• Women musicians

Collections (for more information about these collections, click the “about” tab)

• Gertrude Stein, part of a life in pictures
• Sophia Peabody Hawthorne Collection of Papers
• André Fashion Illustrations from NYPL's Picture Collection
• Creators Studios fashion illustrations
• The history of the feminine costume of the world, from the year 5318 B.C. to our century
• Ruth Mitchell papers
• Women of distinction: remarkable in works and invincible in character
• Isadora Duncan in various dance poses
• Anna Pavlova programs, 1915-1923.
• Brooke Hayward papers

Databases at NYPL and Beyond

In addition to the databases identified in Women's History Month: Researching with NYPL's E-Resources, try the following NYPL databases (all accessible at home by NYPL cardholders):
 

• U.S. History in Context—can be browsed by topics, including:

  • Women in World War I

  • Women in World War II

  • Women's Rights Movement

  • Women’s Suffrage

• Berg Fashion Library—topics include feminism, power dressing, etc.

• American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection—or targeted searching, choose one or more of the following from the database list:

  • American Social Movements

  • College and Student Periodicals

  • Cultural Periodicals from the Southern U.S.,1797-1877

  • Missionary and Charity Periodicals,1793-1902

  • Religious Periodicals for Women, Children, and Families,1804-1878

  • Women's Periodicals of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century,1733-1844

  • Women's Periodicals of the Nineteenth Century,1845-1865

  Free Databases

• Women Working, 1800-1930
• Independent Voices: An Open Access Collection of an Alternative Press
• Building the Foundation: Business Education for Women at Harvard University: 1937-1970
• Library of Congress, Digital Collections -- Women’s History

Many additional free databases are identified on the Women page of the National Archives Library Information Center. And don’t miss these online resources relating to the upcoming centennial celebration of women winning the right to vote! 

• The Women’s Suffrage NYC Centennial Consortium (includes Online Initiatives)
• Women’s Vote Centennial Initiative (online resources highlighted under Learn)
• Humanities New York, Women’s Suffrage Centennial

Last but not least, keep an eye out for NYPL’s upcoming exhibition Her Vote, Her Voice: The Fight for Women’s Equality, currently scheduled to open Fall, 2020. In the meantime, happy at-home researching!