HIS 209: Primary Sources About the Lives of Women in Africa and Asia

 Hi all,

You may get questions at the desk about finding primary sources about the lives of women in Africa and Asia for HIS 209. This is an assignment that really could use a library instruction session, but I am not brought in for one. Therefore, I have written up clear step-by-step tips, and this has worked better for me than a LibGuide for this particular assignment/course. I'm sharing it here so that you can adapt and share any part of it with students at the desk or via chat, depending on what their questions are. You can also send them a link to the tips as a document in OneDrive here: https://uncg-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/mhmurph2_uncg_edu/EVJvwvsK4Z1Nij-TqjC3dSQBwP2B73iE03B-1w-9qQRP9Q?e=RDkJiw

Tips for Finding Primary & Secondary Sources on the Lives of African & Asian Women (HIS 209)

Primary Sources

Let's start with finding primary sources. First, how do we distinguish between a primary source and a secondary source? This tutorial from the University of California, Irvine is very helpful in laying out the difference:
https://www.lib.uci.edu/what-are-primary-sources 

One place to find primary sources for this assignment is the Women in World History Collection at George Mason University: http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/sources.php. These sources are arranged by geographic region, including Africa, East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. All of the sources have been transcribed into plain text (just words on a web site), instead of using images of original sources, so it looks very simple. This is a very common method of presenting primary sources; it would be the same if you encountered primary sources in a print book from the library!

Additionally, if you are interested in African women, I suggest taking a look at the Women Writing Africa Project. We have e-book copies of these anthologies, which are anthologies of original writing (poetry, dance songs, letters, journal entries) from women in different African regions from the about late 18th-century to late 20th-century available through a database called Black Women Writers. Like with Women in World History, of the sources have been transcribed into plain text. The benefit is that there are so many sources to choose from, from women all over the African continent. 

If we start with Volume 1: The Southern Region: The you can navigate to individual sources using the linked table of contents here: https://login.libproxy.uncg.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/publication/2049188?accountid=14604. 

Here is Volume 2: West Africa and the Sahel

Here is Volume 3: The Eastern Region 

Here is Volume 4: The Northern Region (some of the primary sources in this one go back to Ancient Egypt, so pay attention to the date if you are looking for 19th & 20th century sources specificially!).

Since this collection has so many sources but can be hard to navigate, please do not hesitate to ask questions about finding a particular type of source (letters, poems, newspaper articles, diary entries, song lyrics, etc.), from a particular region or country, from a particular time period, if you want to look for something specific! Also, I can help you with 1) figuring out what you're looking at and where the introduction to a source ends and the source begins (sometimes hard to tell in this plain text format!) as well as how to cite anything from this collection in Chicago. 

To find additional primary sources about the lives of Asian or African women, you may want to search the library catalog by going to library.uncg.edu and clicking on the “catalog” tab in the red box. This video is a general introduction to searching the catalog: https://youtu.be/Jz_P74tmlVI 

From there, you can try different combinations of search terms that include at least one of the following subject terms, which are used to denote when a book or online resource includes primary sources:

• Autobiographies—mostly used for collections of autobiographical works.

• Correspondence—used for letters between people.

• Diaries—attached to personal names or categories of people.

• Personal Narratives—somewhat ambiguous term, used for sources such as memoirs, oral histories, and interviews.

• Sources—catch-all term for primary sources, often used in collections with many types of primary sources.

• Sourcebook—can be used in the title for large, varied collections of sources on a single topic, such as New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook (a e-book available through UNCG). Some sourcebooks may also include important secondary works as well. 

This looks like:

women AND (add your keywords related to the topic you are researching, including geography here) AND (pick a keyword from the above list)

For example, to use the keyword sources from the list above, searching:

women AND africa AND sources found Women in African Colonial Histories: https://uncg.on.worldcat.org/oclc/50174773 (an e-book with primary sources).

women AND china AND sources found Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves: https://uncg.on.worldcat.org/oclc/880408069 (another e-book with primary sources).

Another example, instead using the term correspondence:

women AND indonesia AND correspondence found Kartini: The complete writings 1898-1904: https://uncg.on.worldcat.org/oclc/909904194 (another e-book containing primary sources)

women AND asia AND correspondence found The Undaunted Women of Nankin: The Wartime Diaries of Minnie Vautrin and Tsen Shui-Fang: https://uncg.on.worldcat.org/oclc/649913248  (another e-book containing primary sources)

These e-books are all available through different platforms and may be tricky to use. The same thing applies as with Women Writing Africa: if you have trouble figuring out how to use these platforms or need help citing a primary source you found within a book, please don’t hesitate to email me at mmurphy@uncg.edu. 

Secondary Sources

For secondary sources, I would recommend searching the JSTOR database with keywords related to something that interests you. With finding secondary sources, it is difficult to do research when our topic is very broad, like women's lives in Africa, so generally we want to narrow down our search to something more specific as a starting point, and then we can always adjust our keywords later. 

• For example, for this search, I typed: zambia and women in the search box to get my initial results

• Then, in the menu on the left side of the page under "Subject," I clicked the box that says "History": https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.uncg.edu/action/doBasicSearch?searchType=facetSearch&sd=&ed=&disc_history-discipline_facet=aGlzdG9yeS1kaXNjaXBsaW5l&Query=zambia%20and%20women&acc=on&wc=on&fc=off&group=none. 

• From these results, an example of a secondary source about the experience of women in Zambia during the 20th century is this journal article: https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.uncg.edu/stable/160966. 

You can follow the same steps but change zambia in your search terms to another country, and you could add additional search terms, like kenya and women and art or tanzania and women and politics. Make sure to keep clicking the box that says "History" under "Subjects," so you get secondary sources (journal articles and book chapters) with historical perspectives. 

Maggie’s Contact Information & More Helpful Information

Maggie Murphy (History Librarian)

• Email: mmurphy@uncg.edu 

• Appointment scheduler (for meeting via Teams or in-person): go.uncg.edu/maggie

• Library “Ask Us!” chat (you may be chatting with any librarian logged in to answer questions, not just Maggie): go.uncg.edu/libchat

History Research Guide (general resources for history research, including primary sources):

uncg.libguides.com/his