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We're celebrating 100 years of The Women's Library!

Please share your personal memories, thank yous, or well wishes in celebration of this historic collection.

Tips:

Write from the heart, tell us your favourite item or moment of The Women's Library

Add your name in the title if you'd like

Attach a photo if you have one

Like others' posts to show appreciation

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I have very fond memories of visiting the Fawcett Library in the Whitechapel basement in the 1980s and 1990s, the Library’s holdings providing the base material for The Women’s Suffrage Movement: a reference guide.  I remember listening to Prof. Brian Harrison's recordings of those concerned with all branches of the suffrage campaign and I was also particularly intrigued by a filing cabinet holding at least some of the Library's collections of photographs. For talks, I could ask for a few to be reproduced as acetate sheets to show via a projector.  All this was a stepping stone to the marvellous Women’s Library Flickr account of today…and the digitization programme that has made so much material instantly accessible.

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As an LSE alumni I am delighted to be able to have a good reason to keep coming back to campus - I am so grateful especially that you have Edith Watson’s memoirs in your Archive. A remarkable woman whose life deserves to be remembered - and it is thanks to you that she will be. We - the Hackney Society - are recognizing her with a plaque at her birthplace soon. I look forward to finding other stories.

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Having recently completed my PhD, I am very grateful for this opportunity to say a massive thank you to everyone at The Women’s Library for all their advice, guidance and assistance, including cataloguing new material in time for me to view it before my deadline!  The Women’s Library is a wonderful resource where the stories and achievements of women are preserved and celebrated, offering, as I have found, inspiration to future generations. I've attached a photo of Enid Rosser, one of the women featured in my thesis and whose memoir is held in the collection. I think she summed up the importance of The Women's Library when she wrote, 'It is the present and future which matters, bearing in mind that the past has made possible what you can achieve in the future'. Here's to the next 100 years and the stories of more inspirational women.

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I researched TWL in my master's dissertation in 2024. The history was fascinating, and the changes in the spaces over time was amazing to see. The archivists were amazing in facilitating my research.

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I'd never really thought about women's history until I got a job as an archivist at The Women's Library and now I don't think about anything else!

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How to explain my love of the Women's Library! I have been a regular since the mid 1980s and - encouraged by the wonderful David Doughan - I wrote my first book Firsts: British Women Achievers using Fawcett Library resources. Particularly, David pointed me to shelves of "Scrapbooks" of newspaper cuttings that had been gathered since the early years of the library, and which were an absolute treasure trove. In 2002, I was very lucky to be able to produce a live Woman's Hour to mark the opening of the Women's Library in its new home in the Washouse. This was a special programme about women's suffrage with June Purvis, Angela John, Elizabath Craword, Krista Cowman - and Fiona Shaw! (The attached image is from Women's History Review, Volume 11, 2002, Issue 2) I also had the amazing priviledge of curating the "Treasures of the Women's Library" exhibition in 2012, which was originally to celebrate its 10th anniversary in the Washhouse, but ended up being its swansong. Six months of pure joy, looking into every corner of the collections. So many memories, so much incredible history.

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My earliest memories of the Fawcett Library (as The Women’s Library was then called) have gown exceedingly blurred. This was partly because my first visit was half-a-century ago, when finishing One Hand Tied Behind Us (with Jill Norris, Virago 1978); and partly because TWL has since been through such dramatic changes. Luckily, an incorrigible boarder, I’ve unearthed not only a diary entry (February 1976) but also an old address book noting ‘Fawcett Society, 27 Wilfred St, SW1’ ~ conveniently near Westminster.

My abiding memory of that original visit was of ill-lit decay and despondency. I did manage to locate the Industrial Suffrage file I was searching for. But I felt I was tiptoeing into a forgotten feminist world of dowdiness and neglect. BBC TV’s Shoulder to Shoulder (1974) had told the Pankhurst story. Surely the new feminism had consigned ‘Fawcett’ to sad but inevitable decline?

Not so! The City of London Polytechnic came to the rescue, and so in 1977 the Library moved into the cultural mainstream. You might have to cross a bridge over Old Castle Street and then clamber down to ‘our dear old basement’; but new staff (notably David Doughan) brought energy and enthusiasm. My highlight memory was uncovering the invaluable postcard collection that unexpectedly captured the NUWSS horse-drawn caravan tours trundling out to remote Yorkshire dales 1908-9. I included six of these evocative images in Rebel Girls (Virago 2006).

So thank you, dingy Wilfred Street, now more magnificently TWL@LSE ~ for all the memories you have given me, and how you uniquely document women’s winning equal political rights with men in 1928 ~ at long last! The 2028 centenary will be well worth celebrating!

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Without the Women's Library, I would never have been able to research and write my last two books: Endell Street - about the incredible women who ran a military hospital in London in the First World War - and Jack and Eve - about Vera 'Jack' Holme and Evelina Haverfield, who drove ambulances and ran hospitals in Serbia, Russia and Romania through the same war. I'm eternally grateful to the library staff for help and advice. The Women's Library is a unique and vital resource for women's history.

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Coming into the Fawcett Library in Westminster felt like stepping into a forbidden past.....My memories of the Library are attached.

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At the Fawcett Library long ago I consulted an eighteenth-century London magazine written by and for women that thoroughly captivated me. For many years I was not able to get back to London, as I live in California. When I went looking for it again, I learned that the library had closed and worried that I would not be able to find it again. As luck would have it, years later I found the magazine at the Women's Library's new location at LSE. This time I knew more about the print trade and discovered that several years of this intriguing early example of the work of women journalists only exists here. I am so grateful for this careful preservation and renewed access, as well as the chance to share the ideas and labor of these tenacious women writers with more people.

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So many fond memories of the Fawcett Library (London Guildhall University) as it was when I first visited it (I remember having to make various changes to citations over the years!). It contributed so much to my work on the history of sexuality in the C19th-20th in so many aspects - just so much in the archives of the National Vigilance Association and the Association of Moral and Social Hygiene (in its various incarnations). William Acton's scrapbooks on 'The Social Evil'! Feminist journals like The Freewoman and Shafts in the days when one had to locate the scattered physical copies. The wonderful conversations with David Doughan, and how many avenues he opened to researchers out of his knowledge of the collections. Happy happy days spent researching there.

And the vibrant conferences and exhibitions when it moved to the purpose-built premises across the road with spaces for them.

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Happy 100th Birthday from the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

Terrific exhibit! Thank you

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I first started using the Women's Library when it was located at the London Metropolitan University back in 2013 when I was starting my PhD. I latter used the archives when it moved to the LSE. I last visited the LSE last year. It is an incredible collection, the space is brilliant for doing research and the staff are amazing, friendly and helpful. Without the archives it would not have been possible to complete my PhD.

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Volunteering at The Women’s Library many years ago made me realise that a career in heritage, and in women’s history more specifically, was possible. It showed me that archive spaces are about far more than records: they are about the communities they help to foster, the live issues they can still shed light on and that history could inspire activism.

The Women's Library made me feel closer than I ever had to history, despite years of study - touching history made all the difference. I wanted to help get that feeling to other people.

It also made me aware of how fallible our history is and how we have to continue to protect these vital spaces - no time was this more evident to me than 2012. As a student Feminist Society we did what we could to gather support for protecting the collections. I am so pleased to see the library thriving.

I am forever grateful for everything The Women's Library is.

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Happy 100th Birthday!

The Women’s Library is an amazing resource run by fabulous staff.

I visited the Women’s Library when researching the lives of two wonderful Dorset women – pioneering stained glass artist Mary Lowndes (1856-1929) who grew up in Sturminster Newton, and Evelina Haverfield (1867-1920) who in 1909 co-founded the Sherborne branch of the NUWSS.

Mary Lowndes’ designs for suffrage banners can be found in the records of the Artists’ Suffrage League, and the papers of Vera (Jack) Holme includes extensive material relating to her partner Evelina Haverfield.

What better way to celebrate the Women’s Library 100th birthday than by making Evelina Haverfield’s recipe for Bonne Femme soup contained in her recipe book (ref. 7VJH/4/1/06)?!

Thank you, Women's Library.

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Hon Mrs Evelina Haverfield (IWM Lives of the First World War)

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I first visited the Women’s Library (then known as the Fawcett Library, located in the basement of City of London Polytechnic) for research for my PhD, which became my first book in 1995: Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885-1914. David Doughan, the librarian there, was enormously welcoming and the source of all knowledge: he seemed to know everything about first wave feminism and always had new and incredibly helpful suggestions about pamphlets and books I needed to consult. He was also unflappable in the face of the flooding of the basement. But the library needed a new home.

The library’s new home opened in 2002, a beautifully converted wash house over the road from its old locality. I have a distinct memory of this opening, when all the ‘great and the good’ were invited.  Before the speeches, I found myself talking to the unmistakeable Clement Freud (I have no idea why he was invited). When Tessa Jowell, then minister of Culture under Blair, declared how wonderful it was that Britain had invaded Afghanistan to help liberate women from the burka, my friend Clare Midgley rightly heckled her. I cheered and when Freud turned to me and said in his baritone ‘she shouldn’t be at this party’, I replied that she was absolutely right. He then very pointedly turned his back on me.

Later that year when my university at the time, University of North London, merged with London Guildhall University (formerly City of London Polytechnic) to become London Metropolitan University, I became more involved in the library (now called the Women’s Library). For example, when Clare left London Met to teach at Sheffield Hallam, I took over the running of the MA in Modern British Women’s History that Clare had initiated. With Katharina Rowold, we worked with The Women’s Library in teaching the MA and were so lucky to have this incredible resource at our disposal. We encouraged our students to draw on the library’s priceless primary sources for their dissertations.

May the library live another glorious 100 years!