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Research Guides

History : Women: Books & eBooks

A research guide to primary and secondary sources for women's history.

Selected eBooks

Closer to Freedom : Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South
When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958
Suffrage : Women's Long Battle for the Vote
When Abortion Was a Crime : Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973
La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico
Beyond Rosie : A Documentary History of Women and World War II
Female Husbands : a Trans History.
African Women: Early History to the 21st Century
Osage Women and Empire: Gender and Power
Chinese Comfort Women : Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves
Sex and the Weimar Republic : German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis
Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South
From Back Alley to the Border : Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969
Geishas and the Floating World : Inside Tokyo's Yoshiwara Pleasure District
How to Read a Dress : a Guide to Changing Fashion from the 16th to the 21st Century
Slave-Wives, Single Women and Bastards in the Ancient Greek World : Law and Economics Perspectives
Preparing the Mothers of Tomorrow : Education and Islam in Mandate Palestine
Mexico's Nobodies: The Cultural Legacy of the Soldadera and Afro-Mexican Women
Modern Motherhood: An American History
Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France

Using UW Libraries Search to Find Books

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Find eBooks

You can find eBooks in two ways:

  • Do your search and then on the results screen, filter your results by using the toolbar:
    • Choose Availability: "Available Online" and Resource Type: "eBooks"
    • And then click on the green "Apply Filters" button
       
  • Use the Advanced Search option
    • Change "Show Only" to "UW Libraries" and "Material Type" to "eBooks"
       
  • See the eBook FAQ for more information

Search Tips

 

  • By Topic - Type in the keywords that broadly describe your topic. For example: suffrage women japan history
     
  • By Title - search for a specific book by title. Type in the first few words of the book title in quotations. For example: "female spectacle"
     
  • By Author - search for books written by a specific author. Type in the last name followed by the first name of the author in quotations. For example: "yee shirley"

History eBook Collections

 Additional collections of eBooks can be found on eBook Collections guide. The following collections have strong history content:

Finding Books Beyond the UW

If you can't find the books you need at the UW or through our Summit partner libraries (Summit material can be found in UW Libraries Search), use the following catalogs. Books not available at the UW can be requested through Interlibrary Loan. 

Browsing Women's History

The UW Libraries arranges books by Library of Congress call numbers. Though women's history is covered in every regional history section (e.g., there will be women's history in the Chinese history call numbers, the American history call numbers, etc.) the major section for women's studies is listed below.

HQ1075 Sex Role Allen S. 3
HQ1101-HQ2030 Women & Feminism Allen S. 3


For a more specific breakdown of the call numbers see the Library of Congress Classification Online.