Woman's Sphere

Updated 16 April 2025

This is the beginning of what I hope will become a more extensive resource for researching the lives of females ancestors.  The resources below have helped me learn what a woman's life might have been like in previous decades and centuries.  As I find other resources I'll continue to add them, expanding beyond social history.  If you have a suggestion for an addition to this page please leave a comment.

Researching Female Ancestors

• A Genealogist's Guide to Discovering Your Female Ancestors.  Sharon DeBartolo Carmack
•  

Women at Home, Women's Work, Education, and Leisure

• The Ladies Library, Volume I, Written by a Lady, MDCCLLI (1751).  Topics include employment, wit and delicacy; recreations, dress; chastity; modesty; meekness; charity; envy; detraction; censure and reproof; ignorance; and pride.  Volumes II (the roles of women) and III (piety, prayer, fasting, and repentance) are not yet available online.
  
• HEARTH:  Home Economics Archive:  Research, Tradition, History has a wealth of resources regarding the interests of women from about 1850 to the 1950s in the form of journals, magazines, books, bibliographies, and essays.  Read more detailed review here. 
• Old and Interesting is a website that explores tools and other implements women used in and around their homes and farms in earlier times as well as how they managed household tasks.  Read a more detailed review here. 
• Women Working, 1800-1930 is a Harvard University Library website which describes the site as "a digital exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression."  Read my review here. 
• A Housewife Writes.  Musings on writings about housework a century or more ago
• Discovering American Women's History Online  
• Women's History Collection at the Library of Congress, digital collection
  
• 
  

Birth and Motherhood

• A Midwife's Tale:  The Diary, the Book, the Film, the Websites  
• The Midwife:  A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times 
•  

Women's Diaries, Memoirs

• World War II London Blitz Diaries, 1939-1945 
• May Hill's World War II Diaries, Seventy Years On 
• Farm Wife:  A Self-Portrait, 1886-1896  (blog post about the book)
• Letters of a Woman Homesteader and Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey  (blog post about the book)
• Diaries and Journals of 19th century American Women (selected transcriptions)
• 
  

Suffrage and Voting

• August 18, 1920 - A Day for the Ladies (blog post)
• My Grandmothers Eligible to Vote in Their First Presidential Election, 1920 blog post)
•  

Books and Magazines for Women's History including Titles, Recommendations, and Reviews

• The Tin Ticket
• Annie's Ghosts  
• A Fortunate Grandchild and Time Remembered  
• Bold Spirit.  Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America  
• Recommending Book of Ages   
• Ten Plus One for Women's History Month (2014)  
• A Baker's Dozen Books for Women's History Month (2014) 
• Book Suggestions for Women's History Month (2015)  
• Books for Women's History Month (2016)  
• The Farmer's Wife magazine at Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections.  Read my introduction here.  
• The Farmer's Wife Sampler Quilt:  Letters from 1920s farm wives and the 111 blocks they inspired.  Laurie Aaron Hird.
• The Farmer's Wife 1930s Sampler Quilt:  Inspiring letters from women of the Great Depression and 99 quilts blocks that honor them.  Laurie Aaron Hird.  
• 
  

Women's Clothing and Fashions

• Women's Fashions, 1784-1970 - Scroll through a visual overview
• Getting Dressed in the 18th Century - a post and a video that show the layers of a woman's clothing
• Costume in Detail:  1730-1830 by Nancy Bradfield is a book that may help you date a photograph based on women's clothing.  This book includes detailed drawings of women's dresses and other items of clothing along with notes above the clothes.  (I found it at my local library.)
•  
  

I have not yet added any locality-specific resources but will probably do so in the future as I find them.