About the collection

This database/journal brings together innovative scholarship, primary documents, books, images, essays, book and website reviews, teaching tools, and more. It combines the analytic power of a database with the new scholarly insights of a peer-reviewed journal. Published twice a year since 2004, the database/journal was edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin from 2004 through Spring 2019. The collection publishes two editions each year. In 2026, two new editions will launch as part of this biannual release schedule.

Women and Social Movements in the United States Since 1600 is organized around more than 130 document projects and growing, works of scholarship that link an interpretive essay to 30 or more related primary documents, leading users step by step from discovery to contextual understanding. Four new document projects are added every year. Examples from the original edition by Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin:

• "Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners! A Transnational Campaign for Liberation”
• “How Did Female Protestant Missionaries Respond to the Japanese American Incarceration Experience during World War II?”
• “How and Why Did Women in SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) Author a Pathbreaking Feminist Manifesto, 1964–1965?”

The carefully curated and indexed primary source collections include: 

• Publications by State and Local Commissions on the Status of Women, 1963-2000.
• Writings of 350 black women suffragists, 1830-1960 totaling more than 2,000 items and more than 15,000 pages, with links to biographical sketches of these activists.
• Proceedings of the National Women’s Anti-Slavery Conventions in the 1830s.
• Proceedings of Women’s Rights Conventions (1848–1869).
• Proceedings of the National Conventions of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (1874–1898).
• Publications of the League of Women Voters (1920–2000).
• 50 state reports addressing gender bias in the courts.

These primary source collections include rare and previously inaccessible materials. They are enhanced by scholarly essays from leading historians that illuminate key historical issues in those texts and provide entry points for accessing the collections.

A dictionary of social movements and a chronology of U.S. women’s history complement the primary sources and facilitate searching within the database.

By arrangement with Harvard University Press, Women and Social Movements in the United States Since 1600 includes all five volumes of Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary (1971–2004). Also included are previously inaccessible publications of local and state commissions on the status of women since 1963. State by state and year by year, these astonishing publications illustrate and track the full range of issues affecting the lives of American women since 1960. Commission reports are especially rich in statistical data and patrons can create their own charts using a customizable graph tool.

Meet the Editor: Patricia Schechter

Patricia Schechter began editorial position of Women and Social Movements in the United States Since 1600 in 2024.

Patricia Schechter is professor of history at Portland State University in Oregon where she has taught since 1995. She received her BA in American Studies magna cum laude from Mount Holyoke College and then her PhD in History from Princeton University. Her first book, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform (UNC Press, 2001) won the Sierra Book Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians. Her subsequent publications and public history projects have been recognized for their excellence by the Oral History Association, Library Choice, and the American Philosophical Society, among others. With her students, Schechter developed publications for WASM that marked the centennial of two Progressive Era women’s organizations in Portland, Oregon. The first was a digital exhibit and document project on the local Young Women’s Christian Association and the second was an oral history archive for the Oregon Nurses Association. Schechter also served as Oregon state chair for WASM’s suffragists’ biographical dictionary. Her new book El Terrible: Life and Labor in Pueblonuevo, 1887-1939 (Routledge, 2024), is a transnational social and community history of a mining town in Andalucia, Spain.

Past Editors: Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Rebecca Jo Plant

Meet the past faculty editors who oversaw Women and Social Movements in the United States Since 1600 from 2020-2024.

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is a professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine and director of the Humanities Center. She received her Ph.D. in U.S. History from Stanford University and previously taught at Ohio State University. She authored Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: the Life of a Wartime Celebrity (University of California Press, 2005) and Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Cornell University Press, 2013). She co-edited Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 8th Edition (Oxford, 2015), Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (Brill, 2017), and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies (2012-2017). Her most recent book project, Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress (New York University Press, 2022), a collaboration with political scientist Gwendolyn Mink, explores the political career of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color U.S. congressional representative and the namesake for Title IX. 

Rebecca Jo Plant is an associate professor in History at the University of California, San Diego. The author of Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America, and co-editor of Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare, and Social Policies in the Twentieth Century, she has held major fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Australian Research Council. Along with Frances M. Clarke, she won the 2015 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize and Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ Prize for best article for “‘The Crowning Insult’: Federal Segregation and the Gold Star Mother and Widow Pilgrimages of the Early 1930s” (Journal of American History).

Highlights for the latest 2025 release include:

DOCUMENT PROJECTS AND ARCHIVES

• "New Light on the New Deal: Activists Florence Kelley and Frances Perkins" - Fresh perspectives on two influential reformers by Kathryn Kish Sklar and Kirstin Downey.
• "Songs of Kinship: Indigenous Feminism(s) in the Past and Present – A Roundtable" - Introductory essay by Mary Klann and Brianna Theobald, plus 12 essays organized around Political Interventions and Rematriation. Download the Teaching Guide PDF Here. 

NEW PRIMARY SOURCE SETS

• “Autobiographical Narratives by Three Generations of Women Whose Leadership Shaped the New Deal and Its Legacy, 1890–1964" - First-person accounts from three generations of women leaders who influenced the New Deal and its aftermath. Spanning 1890–1964, it captures evolving strategies in social reform, labor rights, and policy advocacy.

Previous Releases:

This online digital journal features biannual releases. Discover more about content updates here.

Empire Suffrage Syllabus- Part of Women and Social Movements:

The year 2020 marked the centennial of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Long celebrated as a victory for “American women,” this milestone had mixed legacies, given the ongoing history of settler colonialism and the different gradations of citizenship in the United States and its territories.

The Empire Suffrage Syllabus digital history project offers scholars and students tools for analyzing women’s suffrage beyond the continental U.S. context by the placing the issue of gender and citizenship in the broader context of empire.

Four different chronological and thematic modules, spanning the period from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries, offer critical pedagogical tools for approaching U.S. women’s history from a richer and more global perspective.

Women and Social Movements Since 1600 is included as part of:

• Women and Social Movement Library Collection
• ProQuest One Women’s Studies
• ProQuest Digital Collections

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