Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement: An On‐line Archival Collection, from Duke University’s Special Collections Library (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/ wlm/), is a marvelous full‐text site focusing on the radical origins of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the USA during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Items were scanned and transcribed from original documents held in Duke’s Special Collections Library to support assignments in Professor Anne Valk’s “Social history of American women” class (Spring, 1997).
Included in the collection are items ranging from “theoretical writings to humorous plays to the minutes of an actual grassroots group”. Material can be accessed either by subject or by keyword search. The subject breakdowns are:
•general and theoretical;
•medical and reproductive rights;
•music;
•organizations and activism;
•sexuality and lesbian feminism;
•socialist feminism;
•women of color;
•women’s work and roles.
The actual content includes such items as the DAR II ‐ (Dyke for the Second American Revolution) manuscript minute book, with the minutes from November 10, 1974 through April 27, 1975; an interview with Angela Davis’s sister about Angela Davis’s first year in jail, from Off our Backs (no date); the Bitch Manifesto by Joreen (no date); and Mary Ann Weathers’s “An argument for black women’s liberation as a revolutionary force” from No More Fun and Games: A Journal of Female Liberation, Vol. 1 No. 2 (February 1969). The display of a retrieved document provides both the transcript of the document and often reproduces the original item, or the covers of the item, and images from the item.
Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement uses Excite for Web Servers as its search engine, which supports the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT; a link to a help page for using the Excite search engine is located on the main page. In addition to searching for matches to your term(s), the Excite search engine attempts to search for the same concepts that your term(s) describe. Concept searching in this case means finding variant forms of the term. For instance, I searched for “teenager” and the search engine retrieved a document with “teenaged,” but did not retrieve “adolescent.” However, a search on “adolescent” does find two documents different from the “teenager” search. As with most search engines, being as flexible as possible with your search language will retrieve the most results.
Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement: An On‐line Archival Collection is a highly recommended source for women’s studies students and researchers. It’s easy to use and provides access to material that, for many, would be very difficult to see, without traveling to special collections and archives.
