Alexander Street Pr. (800-889-5937, x2; lawrence@alexanderstreet.com).
Date reviewed: 10/17/03, Published in Library Journal, November 15, 2003
Price: Negotiated by site.

Alexander Street Press has teamed with scholars from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton’s Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender to create a new collaborative model that will keep a women’s studies project alive and make an important web site broadly accessible. Alexander Street is providing funding support, along with its Semantic Indexing, to produce this enhanced file. The company hopes it will signal a new trend in publisher/scholar collaborations.

The file is based on the Women & Social Movements web site created six years ago by SUNY-Binghamton professors Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar. The prototype product currently available from Alexander Street includes 28 projects and 5000 pages of material, with more being added. Within this first year the file will contain 50 document projects analyzing over 1200 primary documents along with 400 images and related teaching tools, including a unique Dictionary of Social Movements. At least ten new document projects and 10,000 pages of primary documents will be added annually. There will also be a comprehensive, growing bibliography (to be increased by 5000 items within the year), and Dublin and Kish Sklar will continue as editors.

Searching is powerful and extensive. You can search by word or phrase in text, author, primary/secondary/all material, corporate author, nationality, ethnicity, religion, occupation, organizational affiliation, document type, year written, where written (geographically), historical events, personal events, subject headings (broad), subject headings (narrow), locations discussed, people discussed, or record number. For even more powerful, and easy, searching, each of these fields has a “terms” button that takes users to a pick list of suggested terminology.

The main body of material is concentrated in the 19th century, with Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton well represented (although Angelina Grimke and Lucy Stone are both listed only under their married, and lesser-known, names, with no cross references).

There are few 20th-century individuals, though. Those included are mostly civil rights activists, not surprising given the intertwined (up to an historical point) history of civil rights and women’s rights. But to find nothing from Gloria Steinem in a resource that is meant to extend to 2000 is unexpected, as is finding no result for NOW in a search of Organizations Discussed. In answer to my query, Alexander Street Press confirmed its plan to add considerable contemporary material.

The content that is here is marvelous. The document projects are especially fascinating; these are collections of documents, images, biographies, letters, etc., selected and interpreted by historians from various universities.

The collected body of information answers are highly focused, detailed research questions, such as “How Did Lucretia Mott Combine Her Commitments to Antislavery and Women’s Rights, 1840-1860?” and “How Did the Ladies Association of Philadelphia Shape New Forms of Women’s Activism During the American Revolution, 1780-1781?”

The individual document-based question currently listed under Teaching Tools deals with The Nineteenth-Century Women’s Dress Reform Movement. It refers users to various items (such as full-color reproductions from Godey’s, articles and letters from 1851 issues of Water-Cure Journal, and excerpts from the First Annual Report of the Oneida Association, 1849) to discuss and provide a context for why was an important women’s social issue aside from fashion.

The goal of the currently listed lesson plan on Female Moral Reform, 1835-1841, is to “explore key arguments in moral reform discourse; to compare and contrast the viewpoints of different authors on these key arguments.” Six ideas are presented for doing this in class.

Some areas in the database need cleaning up. In the Table of Contents for Subject Terms, there are separate entries under booth “KKK (1865-1882)” and “Ku Klux Klan, 1865-1882,” leading to the same document. And I would add those cross references to activists’ better known names.

But that’s splitting hairs considering what this resource offers. The Social Movements listing alone is amazing in substance and accessibility. Sortable by both movement and year, it ranges chronologically from the Edenton Ladies’ Patriotic Guild, Edenton, NC, 1774, to the Women’s Action Coalition, 1992-1195, and includes references to other movements such as the American Female Moral Reform Society, White Cross Society, and Massachusetts Federation of Women’s Clubs.

The marketing strategy for this site is pretty spiffy, too: the new site launched on October 15, and Alexander Street Press is offering libraries, research organizations, and media free and open access for 90 days. On January 15, 2004, the site will open only to subscribers; orders received by January 1, 2004, get three extra months free.

Bottom Line: Having found so much that is good here, I want more. This is an exciting resource and an intriguing publishing model. Women and Social Movements in the United States 1600-2000 is a solid yet imaginative research tool that all academic, most public, and some special libraries should have. Definitely take Alexander Street up on its generous free trial.

– Cheryl LaGuardia