Women's and Gender Studies is deeply interdisciplinary. Thus, there are many other guides you may also want to consult (I list a few below).
However, while you may certainly find that gender is addressed, either implicitly or explicitly, in books all over the Library, there is also a category of books that considers it primarily. This guide will, I hope, help you to locate those.
When you are searching for books, you will usually use:
There are many ways to search the library's book collection, but it's often easiest to find books (especially in the catalog) when you know the subject headings that describe them.
Subject headings are words that are used to describe what the books are about. There are two important things to remember about subject headings:
These are some examples of subject headings in the catalog. This list is far from comprehensive, but it should provide you with some terms and clues for coming up with more.
For instance, where a specific country, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. is mentioned, you can usually substitute another one. Where you see a dash or the word “in” or “and,” there are most likely other possibilities (for instance, “feminism and education” is only one in a list of “feminism and …” subject headings).
Searching in the ways I've recommended above will bring up an alphabetical list of subject headings. As you can see, each heading is broken down into smaller subjects, so the alphabetical list can be quite useful.
These are Library of Congress subject headings, and they tend not to be as intersectional as I'd like. However, you can do more intersectional searches by using the Advanced Search to combine searches, like this:
Of course, since some of the subjects I've suggested are very broad, you may also want to consider using the Advanced Search to narrow your results.
There are some other kinds of words that are usually good for subject searching:
I'd also like to note that the headings don't always keep up with preferred terminology. Getting a subject heading officially changed is very difficult. So, stay critical of these headings, but you might need to use a heading that doesn't match up with the language you'd usually use to find the books classified under it.
Instead of, or in addition to, searching the catalog, you could also go up to the stacks on Levels 4 and 5 and take a look at the books for yourself. Since the books are arranged by subject, any good book you find is likely to have more near it.
Most books specifically on feminism, gender or women's studies are in the HQ range, which you can find on Level 4. However, many other parts of the library's collection cover the relation of women or gender to certain topics. For example, here are some call numbers you may find useful:
Of course, there are likely to be many relevant books outside these call ranges! Many books cover a topic as it relates to the role of gender, but are shelved with the other books on those subjects. For instances, you can find books about Japanese women writers among the books on Japanese literature.