College of William & Mary LibGuides - Women's Studies

Primary Sources

Primary Resources - A guide to primary sources.

Primary sources include diaries, letters, official documents, interviews, newspaper articles and magazine articles of the time period, etc. Ask at the Reference Desk for help in identifying ways to search for these.

For example, many primary source materials may have been published as a collection of letters, a diary, an autobiography, etc. To search Swem Library's online catalog for these types of primary source materials, try search strategies such as these:

(diaries or letters or correspondence or journals or interviews) and women

women and autobiography

Other sources of primary source material about women and women's issues:

Swem Library's Special Collections - What's available in Swem Library's Special Collections Research Center.

Selected websites with primary source material:

Library of Congress's American Women website

African-American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century

American Women's History: Research Guide

American Memory (Women) - Library of Congress

Civil War Women

In the First Person - Use the subject search

Index to Women's History EText