Guidelines for Submissions, Women and Social Movements

Women and Social Movements welcomes proposals for online document projects. Co-directors Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin have established a Board of Editors who will referee submissions and offer support to prospective author/editors.

Prospective submissions should be built around primary sources addressing a concrete question concerning some aspect of women and social movements in the United States. Ideally the project question should address issues raised in relevant secondary literature. The project should include a brief introductory essay with endnotes and about 20 primary source documents (texts, images, audio or video) with headnotes that address the central question and annotations that identify obscure references within the documents. The project should also include a bibliography and a set of related WWW links. Author/editors of projects accepted for publication on the website will also need to secure permission for the publication of any copyrighted material. Staff of the Women and Social Movements website will provide support in this process.

Because so much work is involved in preparing a web-based document project, and there are limited venues for publication of such work, we encourage prospective contributors initially to submit a 3-5 page abstract noting the project's central question, its connection to relevant historiography, and the central primary sources to be employed. Staff at the website and members of the editorial board will offer responses and assistance to prospective contributors.

We encourage prospective contributors to contact Tom Dublin, co-editor, by email to discuss their prospective proposals before submitting them. All submissions must be electronic--on diskettes, zip disks, cd-roms, or via email or email attachments. We find it helpful to have considerable email exchange during the process of preparing a proposal and then a project because of the unique demands of the document project genre.

Professor Jay Kleinberg of Brunel University has written an article describing her experience preparing a document project for WASM and has kindly permitted us to mount the piece here for prospective contributors. You may find her discussion [CK LINK AES] helpful if you are anticipating preparing your own document project.