Women’s voices and life writing, 1600–1968

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Adam Matthew,

This resource offers a variety of digitized documents that depict the lives and experiences of women through their writing or voices. It currently has over 1,500 items dating from 1600 to 1968. Although personal diaries constitute the majority of this collection, content also includes art, correspondence, oral history recordings/transcripts, poetry, recipe books, and sketchbooks gathered from archives in the UK and Ireland. Users can explore the lives of hundreds of women from diverse social or racial backgrounds including coalminers’ wives, former slaves, deaf women, alpinists, brickmakers, women with cerebral palsy, political activists, and missionaries.

One can browse or search for documents and filter results by date, document type, sourced library/archive, language, or theme. Metadata tags are assigned to themes that enhance browsing and search functionalities. Themes include education, pregnancy/motherhood, politics, religion, and travel/tourism. Each document provides details such as author biographies, keywords, and a list of metadata search result(s) found within each page-image. Users should not employ the search bar found at the top of this resource but rather the one in the middle to avoid the irritating and distracting pop-up window that materializes to announce that additional results can be found in related products. Creating a personal account enables researchers to save searches and bookmark documents/images. Although documents in full-screen mode will impede users from turning pages, one can browse thumbnails of every image found within a document. Scanned textual images include automatically generated transcripts that frequently could not adequately read the original cursive or faded writing, resulting in the transcribed content making little sense. This resource also contains documents dated much more recently than 1968, as it includes interviews from 2022.

This collection has an assortment of enlightening resources. Researchers will discover riveting travelogues with beautiful sketches of fauna and flora from Australia, Europe, and other areas. Some digitized records include pressed flowers placed in the pages of these scanned tomes by their original owners. Engagement diaries provide information related to daily household routines and accounting/budget ledgers that reveal the assorted item costs during a particular year. Other sources include recipes for marmalade and rice fritters. Researchers might find related content in Gale’s Women’s Studies Archive. However, the documents/interviews selected for this collection represent “everyday” women. They allow students and researchers from a variety of disciplines to explore topics such as aging, consumer sciences, disability, family studies, gender issues, women’s health, and more.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through researchers; professionals.

  • Reviewer: E. S. Danowitz, formerly, Delaware County Community College
  • Recommendation: Highly recommended
  • Readership Level: Lower-division Undergraduates, Upper-division Undergraduates, Graduate Students, Researchers/Faculty, Professionals/Practitioners
  • Interdisciplinary Subjects: Women’s & Gender Studies
  • Subject: Reference – Social & Behavioral Sciences
  • Choice Issue: sep 2024 vol. 62 no. 1
  • Choice Review #: 62-0006