"The Road from Seneca Falls" is sometimes dusty, sometimes flooded and many times jammed with traffic. It's the well-worn road of women's history, their journeys from the 17th century onward chronicled on a new Web resource for teachers and students.

The site - http://www.roadsfromsenecafalls.net/ - is a welcome rest stop on the information highway, containing links to 2,000 sites on women's history.

With just one query, "Roads" will direct users to sites that have been evaluated and categorized by educators. Information includes primary sources searchable by subject, grade level and resource type. Students and teachers can weave this information into many subjects of study.

The Seneca Falls project is named after the birthplace of women's rights. It "could change a whole generation's understanding of women's history," said Judith Wellman, a retired professor of history at the State University of New York at Oswego.

She and colleague Joanne Silverstein of Syracuse University's Information Institute earned a $213,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education for the project.

With women making up the majority of the U.S. population and nearly half of the nation's labor force and management, "current social studies syllabi fall short on the contributions and leadership of women," said Wellman, a member of United University Professions, the NYSUT affiliate that represents academic and professional faculty at SUNY.

Teachers or families wanting to visit a historic place important to women's history can click on "Field Trips" and search for links to historic sites and museums relating to a particular topic.

"We really wanted to be a bridge between classroom and community," said Wellman.

Since people often lack time for detailed searches on the Web, Wellman said, "we can do it for them."

Indexes of textbooks were combed, along with databases, collections of primary sources, the Library of Congress, major collections at several colleges and women's history sites.

Many possibilities

Possibilities abound. Seeking a primary source related to southern African-American women's memoirs? "Roads" will lead you to http://www.docsouth.edu/, librarians, and professional staff across the country to answer questions.

In Manassas, Va., sixth-grade teacher Cyndy Mattia assigns every student an American woman to research for the women's history unit. Last year, she used the site for the first time.

"One of the most beneficial things is being able to connect what I'm teaching my students with my passion for women's history," said Mattia, a western New York resident for 42 years.

St. Louis University professor Elisabeth Perry, co-author of two high school level books on the history of women and minorities, also leads national teacher workshops.

"There's so much now available on the Internet it's hard to keep track of it," she said. "Judith's project gives me an updated method for doing so."

It also leads to lesser-known women: Jogansoseh, the Peace Queen who lived at Ganondagon, a historic Seneca village; and Sybil Ludington, a 16-year-old girl who rode her horse through Dutchess County in 1777 to let citizens know the British were coming.

"The site has document-based questions and all the primary source documents you can dream of for development of rigorous and interesting lessons for our students," said Linda Zagraniczny, a high school global studies teacher in Syracuse. A member of the Syracuse Teachers Association, Zagraniczny is on the site's advisory board.

For information, contact Wellman (wellman@twcny.rr.com), Silverstein (jlsilver@syr.edu) or Blythe Bennett (babennet@syr.edu).

— Liza Frenette