Women Writers Project

Women Writers Online is a digital humanities and text encoding project currently funded by Northwestern University, but Women Writers Online is merely one piece in a decades-long commitment by the team at the Women Writers Project to uncovering and investing literary works created by obscure female writers from the medieval/early modern period through the 19th-century. Almost forty years in the making, Women Writers Project, including its many tools like Women Writers in Context, Women Writers Online, Women Writers in Review, WWP Lab, and more, allow for an experimental look into analyzing literature by women pre-Victorian era that encourages a reinvigoration of modern discourse around archival methods, women’s roles in historic literature, and the (in)accessibility that libraries and archives play a role in research today.

Focusing specifically on Women Writers Online, a text database created in 1999, created a blueprint for how Women Writers Project would continue their digital progression for the decades that followed. With over four hundred texts written or translated by women from the 1526 to 1850, this resource is an exceptionally crafted database for any teacher interested in showcasing literature to their students that has a female-centered view. One could even read reviews and dissections of the material they search for in the “Online” database, by exploring Women Writers in Context. The benefit of the Women Writers Online database is that it is rooted in TEI encoding, which allows users to search across the digitized works and focus on one specific attribute of their search. If a teacher is interested in using Frances Boothby’s Marcelia; or The Treacherous Friend by presenting it as a script, the XML data will allow users to print out a script format. If you are interested in exploring how the use of a word changed over time, once you collect a longitudinal study of items, you can use TEI encoding to centralize the word, allowing the user to explore the word’s evolution. 

For any teacher looking to dive deeper into the age of exploration, colonization, and how women in power were affected by this sociocultural and economic evolution, Women Writers offers a couple great literary works written on the subject of Elizabeth I as a female monarch who refused to marry. Ester Sowernam’s 1617 work Ester Hath Hanged Haman; or An Answer to a Lewd Pamphlet, Entitled The Arraignment of Women and Diana Primrose’s 1630 Chain of Pearle discusses themes of power, struggle, and a woman’s right to be present in these discourses using Elizabeth I’s recent reign as the central discussion. In addition, Women Writers historiography and primary sources  lend a hand to World History Commons’ teaching syllabus entitled, “Women and Gender in World History, 600-2000,” seamlessly. While there appears to be no direct relationship of primary sources between the sites, there are many interpretations of the source material that align with each other. For example, teachers were to utilize the course syllabus on World History Commons, a great additional primary source to analyze might be Margaret Cavendish’s 17th-century autobiography A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life, as it both adheres and deters from societal pressures when writing an autobiography, albeit one of the first women to do so and get it published.

This is the reason why the Women Writers Project, but specifically Online, is so beneficial. It has the ability to show these written documents in conversation with one another, rather than how they were viewed historically: often individualistic and viewed with little to no meritable quality.