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When the Women’s Library opened a century ago, the movement it documented appeared triumphant. Most British women had gained the vote in 1918, and in 1928 suffragist campaigners would ensure that they held it on the same basis as men. The London Society for Women’s Service, led by Millicent Fawcett, intended the library to become a home for the suffrage movement’s archives. But even as they continued their fight for the vote, they were looking beyond the ballot box to other issues. The library was to hold material relating to women’s work, too.
This year’s centenary is an opportunity to celebrate the institution’s unique holdings. It is also a reminder of a pivotal moment in women’s political history, as a new commemorative display at the London School of Economics (LSE), where the library is housed, shows. Among the organisations it features is the Six Point group headed by a former suffragette, Lady Rhondda. Equal pay for female teachers and equality in the civil service were two of its initial “six points” or aims. Such battles would continue long after the fight for equal suffrage had been won.
The library has since acquired much more material related to employment, including the archives of Helena Normanton, one of the first women to qualify as a barrister, and the Women’s Liberation Movement activists who fought for the equal pay and sex discrimination acts. But its collections encompass a huge range of other themes. It holds papers from the writer Barbara Cartland, the former Guardian women’s editor Mary Stott, and the social reformer Eglantyne Jebb, who founded Save the Children.
The centenary exhibition and zine showcase original artwork from Sheba press. In 1984 this small publisher was behind a groundbreaking anthology of poems by black British women, including Jackie Kay and Grace Nichols, and the first UK edition of work by the American writer Audre Lorde. The curators also highlight campaigns fought on behalf of children, and the work of peace activists and internationalist feminists who opposed imperialism and championed women’s rights around the world.
Centenaries are celebrations, but it is sobering that such an important resource has had to battle to survive. The library’s Westminster premises were bombed in 1940, and it moved for a time to Oxford. Back in London, the historian Jill Liddington described a visit in 1976 as “tiptoeing into a forgotten feminist world of dowdiness and neglect”. As recently as 2012 it ran out of money, and was forced to quit a purpose-built, lottery-funded space in the East End after just 10 years. The LSE came to the rescue, and while the library – unlike the exhibition – is not open to the public on a walk-in basis, anyone doing research can request access to its precious boxes of letters, diaries, objects, pamphlets, posters, committee minutes and documents.
The library’s 100th birthday is a fine opportunity to remember the decade of its birth and its founders, who are less celebrated than the militant suffragettes known for their spectacular direct action campaign (Fawcett did not get her statue in London until 88 years after Emmeline Pankhurst). But it is also a reminder to face the future as they did. At a time when the rights and freedoms of women are under attack in many countries, the Women’s Library remains a symbol of struggle as well as strength.
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