The internet has excellent resources on women’s history and literature. One is a site for the history of U.S. woman’s suffrage, created by the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM). It features primary source documents, lesson plans, speeches, photographs and more related to the long struggle for voting rights for women.
The website Status of Women in the States provides up-to-date data on women’s progress in 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the United States overall, in five key areas: Employment, Education, & Economic Change; Democracy & Society; Poverty, Welfare, & Income Security; Work & Family; and Health & Safety.
The University of Virginia has a site that has digitized biographies of women. You can search or browse by name.
Has equal opportunity in the U.S. been achieved? (Spoiler alert: um, no.) You can access some of the latest stats are here and here. For a look at the global gender gap, you might enjoy this site courtesy of the World Economic Forum.
What about women’s literature? This interesting article by senior lecturer in English and Women’s Studies at Penn State explores the differences between “women’s lit” and “chick lit” and discusses the “fiction gap” between men and women.
She notes that “The fact remains that women continue to read fiction by men; but men don’t necessarily read fiction by women,” adding, ”[t]o reach a wider audience over 150 years ago, the Brontë sisters assumed male pen names, as did George Sand, born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, and George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans.”
The Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library has a wonderful digitized collection of works by African American women writers of the 19th Century, here.