December 2008

News from the Archives provides readers with news concerning U.S. Women's History from archives and repositories with collections and projects of interest. If you are affiliated with an archive or repository and would like to submit an announcement that you feel would be of interest to our readers, please contact Tanya Zanish-Belcher at tzanish iastate.edu .

Archives Library Information Center (National Archives and Records Administration (NARA))
http://www.archives.gov/research/alic/reference/womens-history.html

This portal provides access to a number of women s collections in the National Archives, including those relating to African Americans, suffrage and politics, and women in the military. There are also links to biographies, bibliographies, and documents available in digital form as well as other resources throughout the United States.

Library of Congress: Votes for Women
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/naw/nawshome.html

This website provides access to 167 brochures and pamphlets documenting the work of National Women s Suffrage Association. The documents include a variety of titles, ranging from An address on women s rights to Are women people? -- from the Women s Rights 1848 Convention to a Lecture on Constitutional Equality. Scholars are able to search by keyword, author, title, and subject.

The complete collection consists of a variety of materials--newspapers, books, pamphlets, memorials, scrapbooks, and proceedings from the meetings of various women's organizations--documenting the suffrage fight. When the Library of Congress acquired the collection from Carrie Chapman Catt in 1938, it divided the collection into the following categories:

Reliable Sources on the Woman Movement
Brief Biographies
Woman and Work
Women and War
Sociology and Ethics concerning Women
The Evolution of Woman
The Woman Suffrage Campaign
Biographies of Women
Women and the Law
Parenthood and Related Subjects
Prostitution
Women and Costumology
Women and Clubs
Letters, Poems, Novels, Humor
Opposition to Woman Suffrage
Scrapbooks

National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW)
http://nfaw.org/women-s-history/

The Foundation has compiled a wide listing of resources for anything relating to Australian women, including biographies and finding aids from Australian repositories. The website features a showcase, which currently is focusing on women legislators, women scientists, and migrant women.

The Women in Photography International Archive
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/WAAW/Palmquist/index.htm

The focus of this archive, curated by Peter E. Palmquist, is to identify, collect, preserve, and disseminate information about women photographers. Information has been gathered without a predetermined emphasis on any particular "type" of photography: commercial and amateur photographers, fine-art and performance photographers, photojournalists, feminist imagemakers, filmmakers, etc. "Photo-related" activities and professions are also tracked, including studio bookkeepers, retouchers and colorists, Kodak refinishers and the like. Current resources include: more than 18,000 biographical files on female photographers; 2,000 books and 4,000 articles "by and about" women photographers; and approximately 8,300 vintage photographs taken by women, many of them produced during the 19th century.