Edited Collections of Primary Sources in United States Women's History: An Annotated Bibliography

Edited Collections of Primary Sources ln United States Women's History: An Annotated Bibliography Kathryn Wagnild Fuller Gayle Veronica Fischer This bibUography lists and describes coUected works of primary sources relevant to United States women's history. Most have been pubUshed within the last twenty-five years but a few date back to earUer periods. Collectively, the documents span a time period beginning in the sixteenth century and ending in the 1980s. The growing number of volumes and the increasing variety of voices they include and topics they address reflect the maturity and continuing growth of women's history. We started this bibliography with works containing a variety of documents and graduaUy expanded coverage to include collected letters and transcripts or excerpts of oral histories. For inclusion, we required that a work contain writings by at least three different women, be historical in content and aim, be written in or translated into English, and treat documents so that they predominate over narrative or introductory or expUcatory materials. We also limited the bibliography to works of three volumes or less in consideration of easy access, portability, availability through interUbrary loan, and potential for purchase. Some recent multivolume works of oral history transcriptions have thus been excluded. In addition to works on women, we also included works on special topics historicaUy associated with women such as feminism, abortion, and witchcraft. We intend our annotations to be informative as to contents and thus they are descriptive rather than critical or evaluative. In addition to the time periods, persons, and topics covered we also indicate special features such as photographs, bibUographies, and indexes. Edited coUections play an important role as supplementary readings in women's history or history survey courses. They frequently hold an appeal for historians and general readers who want to get a "feel" for topics or times from the perspectives of women. They also provide the means for incorporating effective sküls fraining in evaluating, comparing, and analyzing primary sources. In locations where primary sources are few or where the number of students doing research places excessive demands on existing sources, a group of coUections like these can offer enough sources for writing undergraduate research papers. © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 7 No. 4 (Winter) 1995 BIBUOGRAPHY: FULLER AND FISCHER 207 For graduate students, these coUections can provide a starting point for getting ideas about topics or types of sources to use in doing research papers and theses. Many of the editors and compilers incorporated unpubUshed materials in their works and indicate where they may be found. Thus, on one level, they serve as indexes to manuscript coUections that can be consulted for further in-depth research. For aU the variety and number of these coUections, we could detect some gaps and areas with lack of emphasis. The colonial and antebeUum periods stand out strongly in this regard as weU as impersonal documents such as probate lists, account books, demographics, and census records. Whüe these would obviously detract from readabiUty, a judicious use of them scattered throughout more traditional texts would enhance the historical value and usefulness of these edited coUections. Collections buüt around special topics that offer diverse viewpoints is another area in which further work could be done. As noted in annotations of updated works, current publications are more inclusive of differing ethnicity, race, and class, and we expect this to continue. There are some works exclusively on African-American women, fewer on Native-American women, and none that we could locate devoted solely to either Latinas or AsianAmerican women. Here again, further work could be done. Andrews, WiUiam L., editor. Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women's Narratives. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. This work contains four narratives, each edited and introduced by a different scholar. A previously unpubUshed travel account by Ehzabeth House Trist describes travel from Phüadelpha to Natchez in 1873-74. The other three cover earUer periods: Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative (1682); Sara Kemble Knight's travel account of a trip from Boston to New Haven in 1704-1705; and an autobiographical narrative by Ehzabeth Ashbridge (1774). The latter focuses on Quaker Ufe and reUgion as weU...