LibGuides: Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Subject Guide: Primary Sources

WGSS Collections at UCONN

The UConn Library's Archives & Special Collections (ASC), is located in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. ASC also contains the University Archives, as well as thousands of collections spanning a wide variety of topics, including Black experiences relating to the arts, politics, and history in Connecticut, the U.S., and beyond. To view collection materials in person for research, contact ASC to make an appointment. Please note that not all materials are available digitally.

Search tips: Published materials in special collections can be found via the library catalog and are best discovered when filtered by library location (Archives & Special Collections). Unpublished materials (e.g. photographs, manuscripts, records, etc.) are accessible and searchable through finding aids on ArchivesSpace.

WGSS Special & Archival Collections

Alternative Press Collection
The Alternative Press Collection (APC) is one of the oldest and largest collections of alternative press materials in the United States. It was founded in the late 1960s out of student participation in activist movements for social, cultural, and political change. The collection includes thousands of national and international newspapers, serials, books, pamphlets, ephemera, and artifacts documenting activist themes and organizations, dating from the 1800s to the present. The collection contains more than 7,000 newspaper and magazine titles with 90 still on subscription, 5,000 books, and pamphlets, 1,800 files of ephemeral materials from activist organizations throughout the country, as well as posters, broadsides, buttons, calendars, and manuscripts.
Elaine Johansen Papers
Dr. Johansen was a Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut for nearly 20 years, from 1979 to 1996. In the early part of the 1980s Dr. Johansen performed an extensive study on Comparable Worth (an economic concept stressing equal pay for equal work, often applied to arguments of gender-based pay equity). The collection consists primarily of notes, manuscripts, and supporting materials for two scholarly book projects.
Ellen Emmet Rand Papers
Ellen Emmet Rand (1875-1941) was a painter and illustrator who produced works for prominent ladies' magazines, Vogue and Harper's Weekly. The collection includes photographs, diaries, correspondence, and exhibition catalogs.
Louise B. Simmons Papers
In the 1970s & 80s, Dr. Louise Simmons worked with activist organizations, including the Connecticut Defense Coalition Against Racist & Political Repression, the Anti-Racism Coalition of Connecticut, and the Community Labor Alliance for Strike Support. The collection consists of correspondence, publications, pamphlets, press releases, newspaper clippings, meeting agendas, realia, posters, and political buttons that provide information about political, labor, and social issues relevant to communities in Hartford, Connecticut
Marriage Equality and LGBT Activism in Connecticut Oral History Collection
The collection consists of 11 oral histories with leading activists in Connecticut who have been a part of the marriage equality movement as well as been engaged in other forms of LGBT activism in the state and beyond. The interviews were conducted by Valerie Love, Curator for Human Rights and Alternative Press Collections, between July 2010 and April 2011. Six of the eleven interviews have been transcribed and are available online and in print.
National Organization for Women, Connecticut Chapter Records
Administrative records almost all related to the Greater New Haven chapter of CT NOW -- correspondence, flyers, pamphlets, photographs (persons unidentified), directories, membership lists, rally signs, t-shirts with feminist slogans and artwork, newsletters, meeting minutes, newspaper clippings, scrapbook and photograph albums, annual reports, budgets.
National Organization for Women, Rhode Island Chapter Records
The collection contains documentation of the activities and programs of the Rhode Island Chapter of the National Organization for Women from 1972 through 1983. Contains administrative records, publications, newspaper clippings and fliers.
Nursing. Nursing History
The collection provides context and support to the materials found in the University of Connecticut School of Nursing Archives. This area is particularly strong in its documentation of the professional development, status, and legal activities associated with nursing by the organizations in Connecticut on behalf of their members as well as 20th century nurse training. There is limited, but significant, documentation of information on 19th century nursing activities during the American Civil War in the Josephine Dolan Collection. Formats accepted include manuscripts, diaries, correspondence, photographs, ephemera, sound recordings, and moving images.
Susan Porter Benson Papers
The collection contains notes, manuscripts, syllabi, research materials, correspondence, ephemera, and similar materials associated with the professional career of the historian, Susan Porter Benson, a member of the University of Connecticut faculty from 1993 until her death in 2005.
Thomas Dublin Research Collection of the Jewett City Cotton Manufacturing Company
The collection consists of research notes and datasets compiled by Thomas Dublin while he conducted research in the 1980s about workers at the Jewett City Cotton Manufacturing Company in Jewett City, Connecticut. Professor Dublin used materials about the company that are in the Slater Company Records, held in Archives & Special Collections at the University of Connecticut Libraries. Thomas Dublin is a United States Social Historian with an interest in gender, race, ethnicity, and class in the working-class experience. He has focused on both the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century New England and deindustrialization in the Middle Atlantic region in the twentieth century. He is a Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton and the author of Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (Columbia University Press, 1979), Women and Power in American History, (Prentice-Hall, 2008, third edition) co-edited with Kathryn Kish Sklar, and many other works. Professor Dublin received his Ph.D. at Columbia University.
Thomas L. Long Papers
Papers, manuscripts, memorabilia, publications, and related materials collected by Dr. Thomas Long over three decades of teaching and scholarly writing. His focus in both scholarship and teaching domains included medical humanities and health studies, early-modern studies, and American literature and culture. The collection includes documents in early-modern studies, antebellum American literary culture manuscript materials, antebellum abolitionist and anti-slavery discourses (print publications), and a variety of print publications and ephemera related to twentieth-century queer culture and history.
University of Connecticut, Women's Studies Program Records
The Women's Studies Program at the University of Connecticut began in 1974 and was the first formal program of its kind in the state. The collection contains files pertaining to a 1982 Connecticut Humanities Council grant, administrative files, publications, announcements, and fliers.

Finding Primary Sources

The titles listed below are a selection of UConn Library's primary source databases. For the full list, please see our Databases A-Z List of Primary Sources for Humanities and Social Sciences.

Archives of Sexuality & Gender
Includes articles, manuscripts, images, and correspondence on social, political, health, and legal issues impacting LGBTQ communities globally; sex and sexuality; and related issues. Library has access to all five collections: LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940 part I-II, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century, International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture, and L'Enfer de la Bibliotheque Nationale de France.
Defining Gender
Includes articles, pamphlets, diaries and primary source materials providing a European perspective between 1450-1910.
Disability in the Modern World
Magazines, documentary films, and archival documents giving insights into the disability rights movement through the voices of people with disabilities from the US, UK, and Australia.
Environmental Issues Online
Books, films, government records, and archival materials that address environmental and related issues such as pollution, biodiversity, climate change, renewable energy, overconsumption, and human rights at the global scale.
Food Studies
Access is no longer available as of June 30, 2024. For questions or further information, please contact ermsupport@uconn.edu. Includes ebooks, pamphlets, and primary source documents and documentary films related to food studies covering topics such as nutrition, wartime rationing, school lunches, diet culture, and agriculture.
Through June 30, 2024, unlimited users have access to this material. Continued access beyond that date is not guaranteed and is subject to a purchase decision by the UConn Library.
Human Rights Studies Online
Includes articles, audiovisual content, and other primary source materials covering major human rights violations and genocides worldwide from 1900 to 2010.
Mass Incarceration and Prison Studies
Access is no longer available as of June 30, 2024. For questions or further information, please contact ermsupport@uconn.edu. Scholarly books, documentary films, oral histories, and primary sources documenting mass incarceration, prison labor, criminal trials, prison experiences, and other carceral studies topics.
Through June 30, 2024, unlimited users have access to this material. Continued access beyond that date is not guaranteed and is subject to a purchase decision by the UConn Library.
Revolution and Protest Online
Includes scholarly books and articles, documentary films and interviews covering revolutions, protests, and social movements from the French Revolution to the Arab Spring.
Women and Social Movements, International - 1840 to present
Access is no longer available as of June 30, 2024. For questions or further information, please contact ermsupport@uconn.edu. Includes personal letters and diaries, conference proceedings, periodicals, books, and other materials from international women activists from 1840 to the present.
Through June 30, 2024, unlimited users have access to this material. Continued access beyond that date is not guaranteed and is subject to a purchase decision by the UConn Library.

New Collections at UConn

Black Thought & Culture
Includes over 100,000 letters, speeches, essays, interviews, and trial transcripts by Black and African American leaders with a focus on 19th and 20th centuries.
LGBT Magazine Archive
Includes articles from journals covering LGBT interests from 1954-2015.
Periodical Archive Online
Includes articles from periodicals covering the humanities.
Race Relations in America
Includes records, images, case studies, audio recordings, and surveys from the Fisk University race relations department and its annual institute between 1943 and 1970 covering topics such as the Civil Rights Movement, segregation, discrimination, and racial theory.
Vogue Archive‎
Includes works and color images from various photographers, stylists and illustrators featured in Vogue Magazine from 1892 to the present.

Analyzing Primary Sources

Library of Congress Primary Source Analysis Tool for Students
A fillable PDF worksheet to organize observations of a primary source.

Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Subject Guide — Primary Sources

WGSS Collections at UCONN

WGSS Special & Archival Collections

Finding Primary Sources

New Collections at UConn

Analyzing Primary Sources