Databases

Cardiff University staff and students may access a range of databases featuring digitised sources relating to gender history.

Orlando, 1150-current

Orlando provides entries on authors' lives and writing careers, contextual material, timelines, sets of internal links, and bibliographies. Interacting with these materials creates a dynamic inquiry from any number of perspectives into centuries of women's writing.

Navigate according to your interests, drawing on uniquely structured materials:

• People: Access individual author entries, or search on names.
• Chronologies: Create timelines for any subject and period.
• Tag search: Pursue issues and interests through encoding underlying the text.

Defining Gender, 1450-1910

Defining Gender is a collection of original source material from British and European archives, aimed at enriching the teaching and research experience of those studying history, literature, sociology, education and cultural studies from a gendered perspective.

The broad range of thematically organised documents from 21 libraries provides an excellent opportunity for comparative study and research. Manuscripts, printed works and illustrations combine to address the key issues from both masculine and feminine perspectives. They are indexed to provide ready accessibility for students by person and subject across all five sections:

Documents

Ephemera, pamphlets, college records and exam papers, commonplace books, diaries, periodicals, letters, ledgers, account books, educational practice and pedagogy, government papers from the Home Office and Metropolitan police, illustrated writings on anatomy, midwifery, art and fashion, manuscript journals, poetry, novels, ballads, drama, receipt books, literary manuscripts, travel writing, and conduct and advice literature.

Thematic Areas

• Conduct and Politeness
• Domesticity and the Family
• Consumption and Leisure
• Education and Sensibility
• The Body

Topics

Key topics that are addressed within the thematic areas include advice, appearance, anatomy, beauty, balls, birth, children, diet, dress, education, etiquette, entertaining, domestic service, fashion, games, health, marriage, medicine, midwifery, parents, recipes, religion, sexuality, sport, speech and theatre.

People

Included are documents by Jane Barker, Aphra Behn, Andrew Bell, Edward Carpenter, Susanna Centlivre, Nicholas Culpepper, Daniel Defoe, Maria Edgeworth, Eliza Haywood, Elizabeth Jocelyn, Margery Kempe, Joseph Lancaster, John Locke, Delarivier Manley, Gervase Markham, Harriet Martineau, Hannah More, Christine de Pisan, Richard Steele, Joseph Swetnam, Hannah Wolley, Mary Wollstonecraft and many other lesser known writers and illustrators who have contributed to the gender debate.

Essays

Each Section features thematic essays by these leading scholars that relate directly to the source material with hypertext links to documentary evidence. They introduce students to the material, suggest possible approaches, and place the documents within a broad historical, literary and cultural context.

John Johnson ephemera, 18th-20th century

This resource provides access to thousands of items selected from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, offering unique insights into the changing nature of everyday life in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Categories include Nineteenth-Century Entertainment, the Booktrade, Popular Prints, Crimes, Murders and Executions, and Advertising.

The resource is especially useful for the study of women and crime, having the capacity to browse by the name of the victim, name of the criminal, and nature of the crime, thus allowing the isolation of female victims or perpetrators.

Mass Observation Archive, 1937-1950

Mass Observation was a social research organisation which collected diaries and surveys written by volunteers, and produced reports summarising the results of their research activities. They attempted to document and examine public opinion on a wide range of issues. The diaries gave many women a unique opportunity to record their thoughts and opinions on public record, making this resource particularly useful for students of social and cultural history from a gendered perspective. The TV film Housewife, 49 was written about one of the contributors, tracing her path from depressed, introverted housewife to active member of the community as a result of her war-work. We hold records from 1937-1950, though Mass Observation is still active today.

The collection can be browsed chronologically, or a full subject index is available, recording everyday people's views on consumer goods, crime, education, entertainment, family, health, housing, income, marriage, morale, news, propaganda, women, and work.