In the late 1800's, Dutch physician and feminist Aletta Jacobs and her husband C.V. Gerritsen began collecting books, pamphlets and periodicals reflecting the revolution of a feminist consciousness and the movement for women's rights. By the time their 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 15 languages. The Gerritsen curators gathered more than 4,700 publications from continental Europe, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand, dating from 1543-1945. The anti-feminist case is presented as well as the pro-feminist; many other titles present a purely objective record of the condition of women at a given time.

This historic journal index enables the simultaneous search in millions of citations for articles published in the arts, humanities and social sciences, across more than 300 years. It enables researchers quickly and comprehensively to identify articles relevant to their field of study and reduces what could take years of research to a matter of minutes. Journals indexed span 37 key subject areas and multiple languages.