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“Women created and still create forms of transnational citizenship different from the diplomatic or commercial activities that most men have pursued internationally. With this collection we can study that citizenship in depth. Access to this history will be transformative for scholars and students. It allows us to see that much of the global interactions that shape our world today were first forged by women.”—Kathryn Kish Sklar, from the Introduction

Backed by a global editorial board of more than 40 leading scholars from around the world, this landmark collection of primary sources illuminates a vast area of modern history. Through the writings of women activists, their personal letters and diaries, and the conference proceedings at which pivotal decisions were made and social movements were born, this online collection traces the global history of women’s international agendas and illuminates their enormous influence on the course of events and shifts in attitudes that have defined modern life.

At the heart of this indispensable tool for research and teaching in history, political science, sociology, women’s studies, law, and across the humanities curriculum, are approximately 150,000 pages of in-copyright or previously unpublished primary source content—together with links to an additional 150,000 regularly updated pages of primary and secondary resources freely available on the Web—for a total collection of 300,000 pages, all of it Semantically Indexed for search and browse capabilities powerful enough to drive scholarly research.

Central to the collection are more than 10,000 pages of proceedings of international meetings for 25 women’s organizations, beginning with the 1840 World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London and ending with the Beijing Conference for Women in 1995 together with the “Beijing + 15,” which will take place in 2010 and will review implementation of the original Beijing Platform. The proceedings themselves are dwarfed by more than 140,000 pages of reports, journals, manuscripts, letters, photographs, diaries, and ephemera. Reports from different national committees at the same meeting allow the user to compare multiple perspectives. Reports are presented in their original language, and an English-language version is published alongside the original wherever these are available.

Proceedings are often overlooked as sources for study, but in this collection they come to life as snapshots in time and place documenting not just the history of women’s issues, but concerns affecting all communities around the world. With broad topical coverage ranging from slavery to peace, this collection extends well beyond women’s history, making possible a new kind of international history.

Women and Social Movements, International provides an unparalleled survey of the legal impediments to women over time and across cultures, but it does much more than that. In nineteenth-century western culture, women prided themselves on being different from men. Faced with resistance from national political parties and organizations, they sought to further their agendas by enlisting women from around the world, and became well organized on an international scale. Major policies such as Wilson’s Fourteen Points were pioneered by women. This gendered tradition of global activism extended into the latter half of the twentieth century as women remained identified with issues of peace, child labor, poverty, literacy, disease prevention, and more. Through this tradition we gain a new perspective on modern history as a whole.

The collection also makes possible the study of people whose names are not well known but who are increasingly the focus of contemporary scholarship because of their pivotal roles in the organizations and global movements that have had such an enormous impact on modern social history. Barred from the 1840 World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, Sarah Pugh, best friend of Lucretia Mott, emerges as a key figure in the international antislavery movement. Madeline Z. Doty emerges as a correspondent for The Ladies Home Journal in Moscow during the Russian Revolution. Dorothy Kenyon emerges as a major figure in the transition from the League of Nations to the United Nations. The personal correspondence of these and other international leaders gives us a fresh understanding of the world we inherited from them.

More than 75% of this collection is comprised of in-copyright works, with materials licensed from the organizations themselves and from leading publishers. Some 60,000 pages of materials are previously unpublished, including “hidden archives” of letters and diaries from some of the most prominent protagonists. Approximately 10% of the collection is in languages other than English, including German, French, and Spanish.

Other important features include the most complete bibliography of this field yet created together with original essays by leading scholars that complement these primary sources and provide new frameworks for understanding women’s international agendas and actions. Women and Social Movements, International also includes an enhanced Dictionary of Social Movements, as well as newly commissioned biographical and reference material detailing the historical impact of the 25 organizations and their leaders.

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Publication Details

Women and Social Movements, International is an online collection available to academic, public, and school libraries worldwide via subscription or outright purchase of perpetual rights. No special setup or software is required—all you need is an Internet browser. For more information, to request a free trial or price quote, please email sales@alexanderstreet.com.