In the late 1800s, Dutch physician Aletta Jacobs Gerritsen began collecting monographs and periodicals reflecting the evolution of a feminist consciousness and women’s rights. By the time her successors finished their work in 1945, the Gerritsen Collection was the greatest single source for the study of women's history in the world, with materials spanning four centuries and fifteen languages.

The Gerritsen Collection includes two million page images exactly as they appeared in the original printed works. You can trace the evolution of feminism within a single country, as well as the impact of one country's movement on those of the others. In many cases, it also provides easy access to primary sources otherwise available only in a few rare book rooms.

The ASCII text is searchable by keyword and Boolean operators, and records are linked to the corresponding page images, downloadable in Adobe® PDF.