It's Women's History Month, which is a time to celebrate and recognize the important contributions of women throughout history. This month is a great opportunity to learn about amazing female role models, both past and present, who have made an impact in their communities and around the world. Through stories, books, movies, art, music and other forms of media, we can honor the accomplishments of these incredible women. For Women’s History Month, we want to recognize the hundreds--thousands--of archives and resources that can help us tell inclusive, honest, layered stories about the past that demonstrate the contributions of women.
Women Who Rock is a powerful collective of scholars, musicians, media-makers, performers, artists and activists coming together to investigate the integral part female popular music plays in creating cultural scenes and social justice movements around the world. Through their multifaceted approach to transforming subjective understandings of music production by joining forces for research initiatives on teaching, community collaboration as well as scholarly partnerships - this inspiring endeavor continues to accelerate progressive reformations within society. They offer innovative, project-oriented coursework at both graduate and undergraduate levels; a film festival to showcase student work; and an oral history archive that brings all the facets together. The Women Who Rock Digital Oral History Archive strives to nurture participant-driven scholarship, online exhibits, educational content and multimedia production.
The Tradeswomen Archives Project strives to preserve the history of female tradespeople in Southern California, across the country, and beyond. This collection includes a range of photos and documents from this effort. Not only does it feature physical archives housed at CSU Dominguez Hills but also virtual donations received via an online portal for all to access!
This image collection records the presence of tradeswomen in various occupations through photographs, materials, and other documentation - from education and training apprenticeships to women constructing highways in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and globally. Several organizations such as Women In Non-Traditional Employment Roles (WINTER), Electric Women are also featured while policy reviews like Affirmative Action aim to promote female empowerment. Plus there's plenty of data sources available for deeper investigation on tradeswomen within studies, dissertations, or documentary films.
The NY Times Overlooked project is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. Many of these are women whose contributions had been ignored by the Newspaper of Record for millions of people.
Founded in 2014 by acclaimed art historian Camille Morineau, AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions is a non-profit organization with the mission to assemble, index and circulate information regarding female artists from the 19th and 20th centuries. With this project comes a new opportunity to empower women all around the world through their artistic achievements — something that was often overlooked throughout history. The archive includes thousands of entries from over both well-known and lesser-known artists, with various resources such as interviews, biographies and photographs. In addition to its main online platform, AWARE also organizes exhibitions and events highlighting the works of female artists — in France and abroad — all while advocating for gender equity.
Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP), is a scholarly resource exploring women’s global involvement at all levels of film production during the silent film era. WFPP is a digital publication and resource that advances research on the hundreds of women who worked behind the scenes during the silent film era. Always expanding, WFPP publishes original scholarship on women who worked all around the world as directors, producers, screenwriters, editors, and more. WFPP features short career profiles on single individuals, longer thematic peer-reviewed overview essays, and shorter multimedia posts, all by film scholars, film curators, archivists, and historians. In our published profiles, we cover women who worked in national cinemas across six of the seven continents.
WFPP comes out of and is indebted to many decades of feminist film scholarship and archival discovery. When feminism began to shape academic film studies in the 1970s, no one dreamed that so many women had worked in the early silent film industries around the world.
This archive brings together music and sound that relates to gender, created by women artists whose work includes elements of sound. The online archive contains selections from the physical archive, including interviews, sound recordings, musical compositions, and more.
https://interferencearchive.org/what-we-do/publications/documents-from-the-greenham-common-womens-peace-camp-catalog/
The Interference Archive is a gem of a project, privately managed, located in Brooklyn. Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was a 19-year anti-nuclear protest and encampment at the U.S. Military Base at Greenham Common, Berkshire County, England. This is a catalog for an exhibition and event series, organized as a mother/daughter collaboration between Susan Jahoda and Emma Jahoda-Brown, at Interference Archvie in Brooklyn in December 2014. The exhibition assembles accounts of the comings and goings and daily lives of a diverse group of women at Greenham primarily over a nine year period. Photographs, film, artifacts and sound are brought together to reveal a complex view of a largely invisible history. This project honors the visual work of Susan Kleckner and the extraordinary women of Greenham Common who transformed a space — otherwise claimed for militarism and colonialism – into a place of protest, agency, and exploration of feminist politics. Women traveled to Greenham Common from all over the world and supported the movement from their own geographic regions, marking it as the largest women’s campaign since the early twentieth century struggle for suffrage. Catalog organized and written by Susan Jahoda and Emma Jahoda-Brown, and designed by Blithe Riley (with help from Greg Mihalko).
All these archives do a great job of preserving and sharing lesser-researched aspects of women's history. As we continue to explore these and other archives, we can gain a deeper understanding of the contributions female artists, workers, activists, and organizers have made and the lives they have lived.