Secondary Sources

In this essay's focus on types of materials, especially primary sources, you must not forget that the General Collections contain numerous secondary sources. Women's history surveys such as Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America, by Sara M. Evans and Eleanor Flexnor's Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States; mingle on the shelves with much more narrowly focused titles such as Félix V. Matos Rodríguez's Women and Urban Change in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1820-1868 and Katherine Osburn's Southern Ute Women: Autonomy and Assimilation on the Reservation, 1887-1934 (resources are linked below).

Works such as these and the thousands of others in the General Collections are the fruit of historians' hard toil to uncover, analyze, and synthesize evidence in an effort to understand and explain how women have lived. Such texts are valuable for

their depictions of women's lives in other times and places
reminding readers of the variety of women's experiences
models to reconstruct women's roles
showing the significance of gender as a category for historical analysis
presenting different research methodologies
quoting primary sources that are not easily available
providing notes and bibliographies that lead to other works

Secondary sources are indispensable to historical research and make up a major portion of the General Collections.

SEARCH TIPS: Recent secondary sources in the General Collections are rarely mentioned in this guide because they are often available at other libraries around the country, and they are usually easy to find through specific LC subject headings and published bibliographies (refer to those sections of this guide).

Selected Secondary Sources

Born for Liberty by Sara M. Evans
Call Number: HQ1410 .E83 1989
ISBN: 0029029902
Published/Created: 1989-05-01
A history of the changing roles and status of women in America from the seventeenth century through the 1980s.
Century of Struggle by Eleanor Flexner; Ellen Fitzpatrick
Call Number: HQ1410 .F6 1996
ISBN: 0674106539
Published/Created: 1996-03-01
Century of Struggle tells the story of one of the great social movements in American history. The struggle for women's voting rights was one of the longest, most successful, and in some respects most radical challenges ever posed to the American system of electoral politics. "The book you are about to read tells the story of one of the great social movements in American history. The struggle for women's voting rights was one of the longest, most successful, and in some respects most radical challenges ever posed to the American system of electoral politics... It is difficult to imagine now a time when women were largely removed by custom, practice, and law from the formal political rights and responsibilities that supported and sustained the nation's young democracy... For sheer drama the suffrage movement has few equals in modern American political history."-From the Preface by Ellen Fitzpatrick
Southern Ute Women by Katherine M. B. Osburn (Introduction by)
Call Number: E99.U8 O83 2008
ISBN: 9780803220386
Published/Created: 2009
After the passage of the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887, the Southern Ute Agency was the scene of an intense federal effort to assimilate the Ute Indians. The Southern Utes were to break up their common land holdings and transform themselves into middle-class patriarchal farm and pastoral families. In this assimilationist scheme, women were to surrender the considerable autonomy they enjoyed in traditional Ute society and become housebound homemakers, the "civilizers" of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. Southern Ute Women shows that these women accommodated Anglo ways that benefited them but refused to give up indigenous culture and ways that gave their lives meaning and bolstered personal autonomy. In spite of federal policies that stripped women of many legal rights, Southern Ute women demanded participation in political, economic, and legal decisions that affected their lives and insisted on retaining control over their marital and sexual behavior.
Women and Urban Change in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1820-1868 by Felix V. Matos Rodríguez
Call Number: HQ1525.S26 M38 1999
ISBN: 0813016762
Published/Created: 1999
"A potential watershed in Puerto Rican historiography. . . . the only women's history work which investigates the full sweep of the tumultuous 19th century in Puerto Rico, and thus the only one which has the potential for providing true historical depth to the study of women's experience."--Eileen J. Findlay, American University .

American Women: Resources from the General Collections

Secondary Sources

Selected Secondary Sources