Trace the Global Struggle for Women’s Rights Through Primary Sources
In the late 1800's, Dutch physician and feminist Aletta Jacobs and her husband C.V. Gerritsen began collecting books, pamphlets, and periodicals reflecting the evolution of a feminist consciousness and the movement for women's rights. By the time their successors finished their work in 1945, the Gerritsen Collection was the greatest single source for the study of women's history in the world, with materials spanning four centuries and 15 languages.
The Gerritsen curators gathered more than 4,500 publications from continental Europe, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand, dating from 1543-1945. The anti-feminist case is presented as well as the pro-feminist; many other titles present an objective record of the condition of women at a given time.
The broad scope of the collection allows scholars to trace the evolution of feminism within a single country, as well as the impact of one country's movement on those of the others. In many cases, it also provides easy access to primary sources otherwise available only in a few rare book rooms.
The Gerritsen Collection consists of two segments: the Periodical Series and the Monograph Language Series.
In March 2022, the Gerritsen Collection migrated to the ProQuest Platform. As part of the migration to the ProQuest Platform, the Gerritsen Collection gained new searchable full text for each item in the collection, allowing users to get more accurate search results compared to the legacy version of the collection. In addition to the new searchable text, the ProQuest document viewer will allow users of the product to more quickly view each page of every item compared to the legacy version.
The following essays provide an overview of the collection’s coverage of various subject areas for titles in English and German:
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Home Page – Get Started
From the home page, users can conduct a basic search or navigate to the advanced search, to the list of publications, or to a browse page where they can view the Gerritsen Index or the Library of Congress subjects.
Books – Table of Contents
Books within the Gerritsen Collection with a Table of Contents will see it in the contents panel on the left side of the screen.
Document Viewer
The document viewer allows users to view the full page of a document and users can also see thumbnail images of all the pages in a document.
Subject Index Browse
The collection has been indexed into specific subject areas, such as “Biography and Autobiography” or “History and Social Condition”. A separate browse page allows users to see the index terms and link directly to each document.
Library of Congress Subject Browse
The Gerritsen Collection has also been indexed by Library of Congress subject headings. A separate browse page allows users to see these terms and link to each document that is indexed to a specific term.
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