Public Library Of Youngstown & Mahoning County: Women's History Month – Using Online Resources

Press release from the Public Library of Youngstown & Mahoning County:

Sara Churchill

March 3rd, 2022

Did you know that Women’s History Month began as Women’s History Week? In fact, the celebration of women’s history is a fairly recent celebration as its origins go back to 1978 – only 44 years ago! It started in California when Sonoma school district devoted a week to celebrating women’s contributions to history. The idea of celebrating women became more popular and spread across the country. Then in 1980, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed the week of March 8th as National History Week. And in 1986, Congress passed a resolution for Women’s History Month. For more on the creation of Women’s History Month take a look at History.com’s article, which includes a brief timeline video of famous American women. And for a worldwide interactive timeline on women’s contributions, see Women’s Footprint in History created by UNWomen.org. In fact, there are some really great websites for women’s history information, such as: WomensHistoryMonth.gov, NationalWomensHistoryAlliance.org-the organization which was instrumental in having women’s history become a month-long celebration, and WomensHistory.org-the website for the National Women’s History Museum. But you can also find reliable and informative articles on women and their contributions to history using the library’s online resources!  

For all the lovers of knowledge, we’ll start with resources with information for everyone of any age: 

To begin our tour of library resources for women in history, let’s first go to World Book Timelines. This resource contains quite a few interesting timelines for women. If you search the word “Woman,” it will pull up one timeline which is for the Woman Suffrage Movement. But search the word “Women,” and now you will see 19 timelines to choose from: 

As you see, many are covering the accomplishments of women in various sports, but there are also one’s covering women’s contributions to science and space, and women’s firsts. 

With all the names provided in these timelines, a great resource to visit next is the Biography Reference Center. Here you can find detailed biographies on people throughout the world and history. You can search for specific women’s names or go to the Biographies By Genre column on the right, scroll down the page, and click on Women. 

You will now see a huge list of women from throughout history, including the present day. And, while the list is primarily filled with American women, there are women from other countries as well, such as: Live Arnesen, a Norwegian Explorer and Educator; Lise Meitner, an Austrian-Swedish Nuclear Physicist; and Valentina Tereshkova, a Russian Cosmonaut. 

Moving from biographies to educational videos, we come to the Digital Video Collection. This resource is filled with educational videos for all ages. A keyword search for “Women’s History” found 4 videos: 

As you can see, A History of Equal Rights in America is a series of videos. While the keyword search only found 2 of the program videos, you can Browse by Series to find all 8 videos: 

And another series that I found right beside the Equal Rights series was: History of Women’s Achievement in America: America Becomes a Super power (1936-1956) / Volume Six. You can also Browse by Subject. And in the W’s, I found these choices: 

Women 

Women air pilots 

Women famous 

Women musicians 

Women pioneers 

As you can see, there are a quite a few educational video clips to choose from for those interested in  learning about women’s history in American and Ohio. 

Moving down the alphabet, the next resource is devoted primarily to eBooks: eBook Collection from EBSCO.  Here you can find some great women’s history eBooks by first using the column on the leftside of the screen: Browse by Category. Scroll down and click on History. Now click on Advanced Search and in the second search box, type: women. You want the search to look like this: 

This will find over 280 results. Some interesting ones that I noticed as I scrolled down the screen were: 

To find results geared for the younger grades, back on the main page Browse by Category, choose Children’s and Young Adult Nonfiction, then click Advanced Search and in the second search box, type: women. Your search should look like this: 

This will find over 60 results to browse through. Here’s a list of just a few of the many interesting books found on the first page of results were: 

All of these are full text ebooks which you can read entirely through using this resource. 

Next, let’s use EBSCO’s Explora. We have 3 versions of Explora, but the one for all ages of knowledge seekers would be Explora Public Libraries. This resource includes articles from magazines, newspapers and books, plus photographs and videos. A great search to use to find lots of relevant women’s history articles is: “(woman or women) and (history or contribution or contributions or achievement or achievements)”. In Explora Public Libraries, this search found over 257,000 articles to read and 996 video clips. 

On this tour of online resources for women’s history, we now arrive at History Reference Center. Searching “Women’s History” finds over 14,000 articles and books. Take a look at the first page of results here: 

With this all age resource, you can use the Advanced Search to limit results by Lexile Reading / Grade levels: 

This way you can locate the articles geared specifically for the younger grades or the older grades. 

Hoopla, the library’s resource which provides audiobooks, ebooks, magazines, music, movies and TV shows is our next resource. Here you can do a keyword search for “Women’s History” and find over 11,900 results. You can also search “Women’s History Month” and find over 1,000 results including over 150 movies for children through adults. They have even created featured collections of movies & TV shows:

In addition, I found some great eBook collections for this blog topic by browsing: 

There are featured collections of audiobooks for this month for adults and children as well:

There is even a featured collection of Music albums for Women’s History Month!

From here, we move back to an eBook & eAudiobook resource: OverDrive eBooks & Audiobooks. For adults, to find women’s history ebooks, click Subjects, then scroll down to Nonfiction and click Women’s Studies. There are over 120 titles to choose from. For teens, there are three collections of eBooks to enjoy this month: 

For children, there is a Girl Power Kids Collection which has over 20 fiction and nonfiction titles to enjoy. 

Now let’s take a look at resources great for students from the youngest grades through college. 

Our first resource in this grade range provides access to both eBooks and Videos: Highlights Library. This resource has material for those as young as 3 years old and all the way up to the 5th grade. In checking this resource for women’s history, I found that it did not have any videos for this topic. However, when I limited the Books to Nonfiction and searched “woman”, I found 12 books: 

I retried the search, using the word “women”, and found another 12 books: 

As you can see, once again, just by changing the search term from the singular ‘woman’ to the plural ‘women’ found different books to use when teaching children about women’s history. 

Our next resource is one of the newer resources provided to all Ohio residents through INFOhio: Capstone Interactive eBooks. This resource is geared for students in grades 4 to 6, and it provides both full text and read aloud access to a variety of eBooks. I tried a keyword search for ‘women’, and found 20 eBooks: 

I also searched ‘woman’, and found these titles: 

As you again can see, just changing the search from plural ‘women’ to singular ‘woman’ found an additional 9 eBooks of prominent women to study this month. 

Now let’s check out PebbleGo Next. This resource has articles, activities, videos, and games for grades 3 to 5. You will discover many famous women by browsing through the many sub-categories under Biographies. To find articles for Women’s History month, click on Social Studies, then United States, next U.S. History, then Important People in U.S. History, choose  

Going back a step to U.S. History, click on Civil Rights and choose: 

And if you go back once more to U.S. History, click on Documents that Shaped the United States and choose: 

Next, let’s use EBSCO’s Explora. As mentioned earlier, there are 3 versions of Explora. For students in grades K-5, there is Explora Primary Schools. This resource includes articles from magazines, newspapers and books, plus photographs and videos. A great search to use to find lots of relevant women’s history articles is: “(woman or women) and (history or contribution or contributions or achievement or achievements)”. In Explora Primary Schools, this search found over 86,000 results.  

Another resource filled with facts and articles from books, magazines, & newspapers is Gale in Context: Elementary. This is another K-5 grade resource. Searching the word “Women” found: 

It also came up with a suggested topic of: Voting Rights for Women. Some interesting results were: 

 Moving on to Lincoln Library Online, you will find here lots of great articles and biographies on a variety of subjects. This resource actually has material for all grades, from kindergarten through 12th. An easy search to pull up lots of articles for Women’s History month is just search: Women.  I found over 2,500 articles. Among the first results, some interesting articles to look at would be: 

Plus, check out these 4 Women’s History Month resources created by FactCite’s Lincoln Library Online: 

Another great resource for facts is World Almanac for Kids Elementary.  This features articles, videos, interactive games, and activities for grades K-5. While searching “Women’s History” found only a few results, switching to searching the word “Women” found lots results, including biographies of famous women and information on women’s daily life of throughout history. 

Our final resources for grades K-5 is World Book for Kids. This online version from the well-known encyclopedia publisher has activities, illustrations, maps, and more to engage children’s different learning styles. Searching “Women” finds over 400 articles, over 130 pictures, and 8 videos. In the top results were: 

By the way, have you heard of the “Famous Five”? If not, search women in this resource and read about this group of 5 women. 

For the third time, we come to EBSCO’s Explora. This time we look at Explora Secondary Schools for grades 6-12. As mentioned previously, this resource includes articles from magazines, newspapers and books, plus photographs and videos. A great search to use to find lots of relevant women’s history articles is: “(woman or women) and (history or contribution or contributions or achievement or achievements)”. Explora Secondary Schools found over 241,000 results.  

Gale eBooks provides full text access to a variety of reference books. Before the internet and this online resource, these would be books that were limited to in-library use only. Now, anyone with a library card from the Public Library of Youngstown & Mahoning County and a device that connects to the internet can search and read articles from these reference books anywhere in the world. Similar to using EBSCO’s eBook Collection, the more relevant women’s history articles are found by first using Browse Collections and clicking History. Then, click in the upper left, where you see the phrase “search within collection”, and type “women”, and click the magnifying glass (or press Enter on the keyboard). This search finds over 1,800 results. When I did this search, the first 3 results were: 

Browsing through these articles and others that were found may introduce you to aspects of women’s history that had not occurred to you. 

Similar to Gale eBooks, Salem Online provides full text access to reference books. For the topic of Women’s History, there are two books to search through in this resource: 

Each entry in American First Ladies includes a picture and the following 

Working Americans 1810-2015 Volume VI: Women at Work contains 42 Personal Profiles divided into 13 chapters, each covering a decade from 1810-2015. The life of three to five Working Women is profiled in each chapter. You will learn about their annual income and household budgets, life at home and work, community involvement, prices of the time and cost of living, working conditions, social activities, and much more. 

Our next resource is great for those looking for pro/con debate type articles: Opposing Viewpoints in Context. There are lots of results when you search “Women’s History”. But it’s also interesting to click the “Browse All 464 Issues” found in the lower right corner on the main page of this resource.  Among the issues relevant to women are: 

When you search by keyword or choose one of the browse topics, the results provide not only a variety of viewpoint articles, but also biographies, reference works, infographics, statistics, primary sources, magazine & newspaper articles, and audio & video recordings – and even recommended websites. 

Another debate resource is Points of View Reference Center. A keyword search for “women’s history” here finds 17 full text results. Going back to the main page of this resource, under the Browse by Category, you will find Women’s Issues, which includes such topics as: 

Clicking on one of these topics will open an overview article with Related Items links on the right to click to see the Point, Counterpoint, and Guide to Critical Analysis. On the left, there are links to Related Information: various points of view; magazine, newspaper, & book articles; radio & TV transcripts; and some primary source documents. As you can see, again you will find quite a variety of resources on women’s history by either browsing by topic or searching by keyword. 

Looking for facts, a new resource provided by INFOhio is World Almanac for Kids. Geared for students in grades 6-8, this features articles, videos, games, science projects, fun facts, maps, flags and more. Among the many results found when searching “Women” were: 

Searching “Women’s History” found articles on many significant women, such as: 

Our final resources for this section are two more World Book resources. World Book Student for grades 5-10 and World Book Advanced for grades 9-12. These multimedia online encyclopedias provide not only articles, but also pictures, sounds, videos & animations, tables, resource guides and recommended websites. Both resources find similar results when searching “Women’s History” or “Women.” In fact, the only difference is that World Book Student includes Special Reports. 

For those looking for a college-level discussion of women’s history. Oxford Research Encyclopedias provides access to full-text peer reviewed articles from 25 Oxford college-level encyclopedias. Searching “Women’s History” finds over 4,900 results, with academic articles covering the history of women in countries from across the globe. Of course, you can find lots more results by going more general and searching the word “Women,” or you may want to try other search phrases, such as “Women’s Movement” or “Women’s Rights”. Very Short Introductions has the full text to American Women’s History: A Very Short Introduction. This book actually has over 140 pages, so you may want to consider is as a actually being a fairly detailed introduction! 

As you see, the library has lots of reliable online resources to use to find information on women and women’s history!

Sara Churchill

Sara Churchill is the Digital Services Specialist and Assistant Supervisor in the Information Services Department at Main Library. A major fan of technology devices and computer research resources at work, she enjoys helping everyone learn to use their devices and the library's many online resources.  She loves reading Science Fiction/Fantasy books, British cozy mysteries, True Crime and other true stories, plus a past reader of horror fiction by the likes of Stephen King and John Saul (among others).  Also, she’s a big fan of Sci-fi, action, horror, spaghetti westerns, and based-on-a-true story movies.  Her blogs are for adults and the entire family to enjoy reading and trying out the many online resources free for PLYMC library cardholders to use.

This press release was produced by the Public Library of Youngstown & Mahoning County. The views expressed here are the author’s own.