Celebrating Women's History Month

In honor of Women’s History Month, we are highlighting select resources that underscore the role of women in American history, including items in Jenkins’s collection that highlight women and the law.

Womenshistorymonth.gov offers a trove of online collections that amplify women’s voices and celebrate various women’s contributions to U.S. history. Hosted jointly by the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the site includes a slew of digital exhibits that capture the many aspects of women’s lives. The collections include images, audio, and video that touch on topics such as suffrage, culture and folklife, women and war, and government, politics, and law. The African-American Women Changemakers photo collection, Songs of American Indian Women, and Space for Women are just a few of the exhibits linked to on the site.

For additional resources, the National Women’s History Alliance and the online National Women’s History Museum feature resources such as a calendar entitled “This Month in Women’s History,” a detailed timeline of the women’s rights movement, fascinating articles, and stories that chronicle diverse American women’s lives. If you’re interested in the origins of Women’s History Month, check out the information on both the Library of Congress and the American Library Association websites.

At Jenkins, you can find both print and electronic resources about women in the law by searching for “wom*n” or “wom*n history” in our catalog (you can then use the “Modify” button to limit your search to specific collections such as "Pennsylvania," for example). A few print titles of interest include History of Women in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives 1923-2001, Pioneering Women Lawyers: From Kate Stoneman to the Present, What it Takes: How Women of Color Can Thrive within the Practice of Law, and Women Lawyers in Leadership 2018. Jenkins members can find electronic titles such as Woman Suffrage and Politics through the HeinOnline database. This HeinOnline blog post also describes how to use the database to research the work of significant historical figures like Susan B. Anthony or modern day professor of law and developer of intersectionality theory, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw.