Collection Description

There are, for example, over 100,000 books, periodicals, videos, and microforms catalogued with “women,” “gender,” or “feminism” as a subject heading. In addition, there are thousands of novels, poetry collections,and plays written by women. Campus holdings, in particular in the Wisconsin Historical Society, are especially rich in “women’s liberation” periodicals and other activist publications from the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s.

Gender & Women’s Studies Librarian’s Office website

In Memorial Library

Material acquired in Memorial Library includes print and electronic books and periodicals, other electronic resources, microforms, and audiovisual items. Memorial Library collects Gender and Women’s Studies material comprehensively to support the curriculum of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, courses in other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that examine gender factors, and research on gender and women topics focusing on the United States as well as other countries and regions of the world, in English and in many other languages.

In addition, the Gender & Women’s Studies Librarian’s Office is housed in Memorial Library. This Office publishes three periodicals: Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women’s Studies Resources, Feminist Periodicals: A Current Listing of Contents, and New Books on Women, Gender & Feminism; WAVE: Women’s Audiovisuals in Englishdatabase of video information; and research guides such as “Researching Topics in Gender and Women’s Studies,” “LGBTQ Studies,” and “Statistics on Women and Gender: Where and How to Find.” The Office also maintains a reference collection and offers research assistance and library instruction.

Women’s and Gender Studies subject areas emphasized in the Memorial Library collection are feminist theory; sociology (including the study of women in self-selected and socially–defined groups, the study of social problems affecting women); studies of the intersection of gender with race, class, ethnicity, and other “differences;” women’s history; and literature by women, literary criticism about women’s writing, and studies of women writers. Memorial Library also has extensive material in sexuality studies and on women and gender aspects of anthropology, communication arts, economics, education, film studies, health, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, political science, religion, and science; and gender factors concerning every country and inhabited region of the world. Of note are the many German–language gay and lesbian periodicals and pamphlets in the collection.