North American Women’s Drama
provides the full text of 1,500 plays written from
colonial times to the present by more than 100 women
from the United States and Canada. Many of the works are
rare, hard to find, or out of print. Almost a quarter of
the collection consists of previously unpublished plays.
The database will be of particular interest for the
study of feminism and women’s studies.
North American Women’s Drama begins with the
works of Mercy Otis Warren, Judith Sargent Murray, and Susanna Haswell
Rowson in colonial times. It includes a rich collection of
nineteenth-century melodramas exploring topics from domestic entrapment
to life on the frontier to the Underground Railroad. The database covers
the campaign for voting rights, including propaganda plays, as well as
the growing crusade for women’s access to higher education and inclusion
in various professions. The collection covers contemporary drama,
including the works of performance artists.
Ways to use the database:
-
Table of
Contents--
Use these to see what's contained in the database. This is the best
way to check whether an author or a source is included. To use this
tool, simply click on the appropriate table of contents button on
the navigation bar.
-
Find Tools
-- The "FIND" tools let you search for specific authors and sources
that the database contains and combine criteria to narrow down what
you're looking for. The difference between the "FIND" tools and the
"SEARCH" tools (explained next) is in the results they give. The
"FIND" tools do not return documents, but rather lists of authors
and sources in the database.
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Search Tools
-- The "SEARCH" tools let you analyze words and documents that occur
within the text of stories that meet your search criteria. The
"SEARCH" tools return stories or bibliographic citations or both.
Boolean Operators in Full-Text Searching:
-
The vertical line ( | ) is the OR operator (e.g., avarice|greed or
holy ghost|spirit).
-
Space: serves as the AND operator in sentence and paragraph
Proximity Searching (e.g., church state retrieve all cases where
church and state appear in the same specified context; this is not
the case in phrase searching).
-
These expressions can be combined for more
sophisticated searches; for example, searching
old|aged|ancient m.n|fellow*
finds any of the three adjectives together with the nouns man or
fellow in the singular or plural.
Wildcard
Characters in Full-Text Searching:
.
(period):
matches any single character (e.g., gentlem.n will retrieve gentleman
and gentlemen).
*
(asterisk):
matches any string of characters, anchoring the match at the beginning
of a word (e.g., cigar* will match cigar, cigars, cigarette, etc.).
*
(asterisk):
matches any string of characters, anchoring the match at the end of a
word (e.g., *habit will retrieve habit, cohabit, and inhabit), or in the
middle (e.g., c.*eers matches compeers, cheers, and careers).
.?
(period question mark):
matches the characters entered or the characters entered plus one more
character in place of the question mark (e.g., hono.?r matches both
honor and honour and cat.? matches cat and cats, but not cathedral,
Catherine, etc.).
[a-z] (brackets):
matches a single character found in the specified range (e.g., [c-f]at
will match cat, dat, eat, and fat) or any letters within the brackets
(e.g., civili[zs]e will match both civilize and civilise).
#
(hash mark):
matches capitalized words only (e.g., #bacon will retrieve Bacon, but
not bacon). Otherwise word searches are case insensitive. Please note
that this operator does not work properly in conjunction with the
vertical bar (e.g., searching #hamlet|#bacon will not retrieve accurate
results).
E
(capital letter):
matches all accented and non-accented forms (e.g., to search naïveté
regardless of accents type naIvetE).
You may access
North American Women’s Drama from anywhere
with a valid APSU ID.
