See also specific people under People page.
See also Prohibition, Voting & Elections, Medical & Life Sciences, Military and other topics.
Even when not online, the catalog record will have information for your citations
Digitized images of over 1,100 American magazines and journals that began publication between 1740 and 1900. Remote access with a library card issued by the Connecticut State Library.
Massachusetts Troublemakers by From Library of Congress Blog https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2015/03/women-in-history-voting-rights/?loclr=eaiclb
See the main guide as well.
Since You Went Away by
LIBGUIDES: ""Last night Mel and I were talking about some of the adjustments we''ll have to make to our husbands'' return. I must admit I''m not exactly the same girl you left-I''m twice as independent as I used to be and to top it off, I sometimes think I''ve become ''hard as nails''. . . . Also--more and more I''ve been living exactly as I want to . . . I do as I damn please." [These tough words from the wife of a soldier show that World War Ii changed much more than just international politics.] "From a fascinating collection of letters, filled with wonderfully distinctive human stories, Judy Barrett Litoff and David C. Smith have shpaed a rare and brilliant book that transports the reader back in time to an unforgettable era."--Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. "This is a wonderful volume, full of admirable women struggling in a difficult situation, doing their best for their families and their country. Ah, the memories it brings back! Highly recommended for those who lived through the war, and for those who want to understand it."--Stephen E. Ambrose, author of Eisenhower and D-Day, June 6, 1944 "Offering a remarkable view into the lives of ordinary women during wartime, this book will enlighten and catch at the hearts of general readers and cause historians to reconsider how women experienced World War II."-Susan M. Hartmann, author of The Home Front and Beyond. "From among 25,000 of an estimated six billion letters sent overseas during World War II, Litoff and Smith have culled and skillfully edited a sampling by 400 American women. These letters, starting with one to a seaman wounded at Pearl Harbor, are compelling documents of home-front life in varied ethnic, cultural, and financial milieus. Tragic, touching, and funny, the correspondence is full of prosaic news and gossip about jobs and neighbors, along with accounts of births and intimate allusions to love-making. The stress of separation was intensified for women whose loved ones were hospitalized, or imprisoned as either conscientious objectors or security risks. Some women wrote General MacArthur and others for news of missing men or to obtain details of their deaths. Many of these heartrending documents also express acceptance-and even pride-in the sacrifices required by war."--Publishers Weekly. "Other scholars of WW II have published letters written home by servicemen, but this is the first collection sampling the letters written by sisters, sweethearts, wives, and mothers, saved by thousands of servicemen. Chapters are organized around themes that were important to these women: courtship, marriage, motherhood, work, sacrifices. . . . What women tell readers in these letters about their concerns and their wartime feelings will cause historians [readers?] to rethink what has been written about the homefront."--Choice. "Despite the popular appeal of Rosie the Riveter, nine out of ten mothers with children under six were not in the labor force, which helps to account for the vast outpouring of mail from the home front to ''our boys'' in the European and Pacific theaters. Some couples wrote every day for four years. This is the rich historic documentation that the authors have drawn upon to create a panoramic pastiche of indefatigable, energetic, patriotic female letter writers in the war years. . . . One is struck by the hard-headed practicality of many of the letters-stories of plucky, sometimes even grumpy, coping. There are letters of growing independence, with strong and at times explicit indication that the boyfriend or husband will be facing a very different woman upon his return from the one he ''knew'' when he disembarked for his own, often terrible, venture. . . . Every war leaves mothers with broken hearts. What this volume most remarkably demonstrates is just how prepared American women on the home front were for that dread eventuality."--Jean Bethke Elshtain in the Journal of American History. "Fascinating and often heartbreaking letters. . . . The letters illuminate a time when sex roles were first showing the changes that would culminate in the women''s movement. ''I must admit I''m not exactly the same girl you left,'' Edith Speert wrote to her husband, Victor, in 1945. ''I''m twice as independent as I used t be, and I sometimes think I''ve become hard as nails. I don''t think my changes will affect our relationship.''. . . In the end, it is the small human dramas in these letters that stand out. Anne Gudis, miffed to distraction by her soldier-swain Sam Kramer, writes what may be the shortest Dear John on record: ''Mr. Kramer: Go to hell! With love, Anne Gudis.'' A woman working at a Honolulu nightclub assures a pilot that she''ll wait for him-until she''s 20. The wife of an Air Corps navigator reads in a news story that only 15 of 1,500 Allied bombers were lost in a raid over Europe and later learns that her husband died in one of the 15. And a grieving mother whose son died in the Pacific asks Gen. Douglas MacArthur, in desperation, ''Please general he was a good boy, wasn''t he? Did he die a hard death?''"--Smithsonian. "''They made it possible for me to retain my sanity in an insane world,'' wrote one pilot about the letters his wife sent him throughout World War II. The letters contained in this collection explain the soldier''s sentiments. Whether full of passionate longing for a missing sweetheart or merely detailing domestic gossip, the letters offer a rich introduction to how American women experienced the war. Since military authorities ordered soldiers not to keep any letters written them by their loved ones, the authors have done a magnificent service in obtaining letters that soldiers either surreptitiously hid or whose authors copied them before sending them on."--Library Journal."
See main guide as well. Sometimes items are listed under "Military", sometimes under "Women", and some resources are applicable for different branches of the military. It is up to the researcher to choose which to use.
The Women's Army Corps by 
One Woman's Army by The Women's Army Corps by 
Women in the Military by "U.S. Military Women in World War II: The SPAR, WAC, WAVES, WASP and Women Marines in U.S. Government Publications" by Laurie Scrivener. Journal of Government Information, Vol. 26, No. 4, pp. 361–383, 1999
Focus: An exhibit highlighting and analyzing the triumphs made and tragedies endured by civilian women in the air force who became known as the WASPs.
Women Pilots of World War II by The Women's Army Corps by This is not all the legislation that impacted WASPs, but a selection.
Most items can be found in the Connecticut State Library (CSL) Regional Federal Depository Program (FDLP) collection.
Whenever possible, links go to freely available online items.
CSL also has subscription databases that have much of the information.
When using GovInfo.gov or Congress.gov, there will be links to related documents. Unless there is a compelling reason to include them or they are not online, they will not be listed here. Contact us if you need them.
September, 1939 military plan to have women as auxiliary and not of military status.
January 1942 "In January 1942, Rogers added an amendment to her bill that would grant women the same military status and benefits as men. Bitterly contested in Congress, the bill only passed after it was decided that women would not be given military status, and on 15 May 1942 President Roosevelt signed Public Law 77-554 establishing the Women Army Auxiliary Corps" Source "My Best Soldiers" https://www.army.mil/article/13127/my_best_soldiers_thirty_six_years_of_the_womens_army_corps
July 1942 PL 77-689 - WAVES and Marine women's corps were established. Secretary of Navy Frank Knox wanted Navy women to have military status.
November 1942 PL 77-773 SPAR established (Coast Guard) with military status. June 28, 1943 The USCGA was the first US military academy to accept women.
WFTD & WAFS formed. They later merged into WASPs - as civil service employees.
July 1, 1943 PL 78-110 WAAC become WAC with military status
HR 4219 introduced to give WASPs military status, but it was defeated.
"In January 1943, Congresswoman Rogers and Oveta Culp Hobby, Director of the WAAC, drafted a bill which was endorsed by General Marshall and introduced into Congress. Even though military status was again contested in the House, the bill eventually passed, and President Roosevelt signed Public Law 78-110 on July 1, 1943..." Source "My Best Soldiers" https://www.army.mil/article/13127/my_best_soldiers_thirty_six_years_of_the_womens_army_corps
Army & Navy Nurses Corps moved from auxiliary to military status.
December 1944 WASP ceased to exist
WASPs were not a women's corps, but civil service employees
President Truman signed executive order desegregating the U.S. armed forces.
Focus: Revolutionary Women and how the role of women changed during and after the War
America's Women in the Revolutionary ERA by 
Sybil Ludington by
LibGuides: "She was only 16 when she rode through the night to summon her father's regiment to stop the British advance into NY after burning Danbury."
Revolutionary Mothers by
LibGuides: "The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American, and Carol Berkin shows us that women played a vital role throughout the struggle. Berkin takes us into the ordinary moments of extraordinary lives. We see women boycotting British goods in the years before independence, writing propaganda that radicalized their neighbors, raising funds for the army, and helping finance the fledgling government. We see how they managed farms, plantations, and businesses while their men went into battle, and how they served as nurses and cooks in the army camps, risked their lives seeking personal freedom from slavery, and served as spies, saboteurs, and warriors. She introduces us to sixteen-year-old Sybil Ludington, who sped through the night to rouse the militiamen needed to defend Danbury, Connecticut; to Phillis Wheatley, literary prodigy and Boston slave, who voiced the hopes of African Americans in poems; to Margaret Corbin, crippled for life when she took her husband’s place beside a cannon at Fort Monmouth; to the women who gathered firewood, cooked, cleaned for the troops, nursed the wounded, and risked their lives carrying intelligence and participating in reconnaissance missions. Here, too, are Abigail Adams, Deborah Franklin, Lucy Knox, and Martha Washington, who lived with the daily knowledge that their husbands would be hanged as traitors if the revolution did not succeed. A recapturing of the experiences of ordinary women who lived in extraordinary times, and a fascinating addition to our understanding of the birth of our nation."
Women Patriots of the American Revolution by
LibGuides: "This book contains the biographies of 600 women who performed patriotic acts. Some of these women rode on horseback to warn the Americans of a British attack; a few carried muskets; many were captured by Indians; many had husbands or sons who were killed or taken as prisoners. These women spun flax, made shirts, knitted socks, cooked food, or nursed the soldiers, and some spied for the Americans. With a list of 4,500 additional women who suffered damage from the British or provided provisions for the troops."
Coping with Tragedy by 
Weathering the Storm by 
Masquerade by
LIBGUIDES: "The remarkable story of the woman who fought in the American Revolution as Robert Shurtliff–and got away with it.Serving for seventeen months during the period between the British surrender at Yorktown and the signing of the final treaty, a time when peace was far from secure, Deborah Sampson accomplished her deception by becoming an outstanding soldier. Alfred Young shows us why she did it and exactly how she carried it off. He meticulously reconstructs her early life as an indentured servant; her young adulthood as a weaver, teacher, and religious rebel; and her military career in the light infantry–consisting of dangerous patrols and small-party encounters, duty that demanded constant vigilance–followed by service as an orderly to a general at West Point.Young also examines her postwar life as a wife–Mrs. Benjamin Gannett–and mother on a hardscrabble farm in southeastern Massachusetts, her collaboration with Herman Mann on the book that made her a celebrity and sent her on a pathbreaking yearlong lecture tour through New England and New York in 1802-03, and her relentless and partially successful quest for veterans' benefits. He looks, too, at how Americans have dealt with Sampson in public memory and have appropriated her for a number of causes over the past two hundred years.Throughout we are aware of the historian as detective, as Young carefully sifts through layers of fact and fiction to reveal a fascinating, complex, and unusual woman who lived in an era that both opened opportunities to and imposed limitations on women."
Women in the Age of the American Revolution by Connecticut State Library | 231 Capitol Avenue, Hartford, CT 06106 | 860-757-6500 * Toll-free 866-886-4478
Disclaimers & Permissions | Privacy Policy | State of Connecticut Home Page
The State of Connecticut is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer and strongly encourages the applications of women, minorities, and persons with disabilities.