Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000

The Women and Social Movements web site emerged in December 1997 as an outgrowth of an experimental undergraduate research seminar in U.S. women’s history.  By 2001-2003, the site’s editors had involved colleagues from twelve colleges and universities to encourage and publish student research projects on the site.  And since 2004 the web site has become a peer-reviewed online scholarly journal publishing research on the frontiers of the evolving field of U.S. women’s history.

            This presentation will discuss the evolution of the web site, emphasizing the ways that the project’s technology has contributed simultaneously to scholarly research and the preservation of rare research resources.  One pattern that has become apparent over this period is the way that the web site’s evolving focus has elicited cutting-edge research within the field.  Two editorial initiatives have expanded the site’s reach to include Canadian women and social movements and the interaction of women reformers from the United States, Europe and Meiji Japan.  The internationalization of American History has been very much reflected in submissions of prospective document projects.

 Moreover, the publication of full-text sources and document archives has permitted the web site to make signal contributions to the preservation of and improved access to rare research resources.  We have digitized more than forty hours of speeches recorded on cassette tapes of the 1977 Houston National Women’s Conference, the five-year run of the suffrage newspaper, The National Citizen and Ballot Box, and thirteen years of the “Mainly for Women” column of the Canadian populist newspaper, The Western Producer, and we are currently working on reprinting online substantial portions of the early lesbian newspaper, The Ladder.