Women's Library

The Women’s Library is England’s leading research centre on women’s history and the women’s movement. It sits within the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics, in the City of Westminster. The collection began in 1909 with a private library founded by Ruth Cavendish Bentinck and became a public resource in the mid-1920s. Vera Douie served as librarian for forty-one years, expanding the holdings and building an international reputation. In 2002 the library moved into a purpose-built space in Aldgate designed by Wright & Wright Architects. Since 2013 it has been cared for by the LSE, which maintains it as a separate unit with its own reading room and archives. The library holds more than sixty thousand books and pamphlets, over three thousand five hundred periodicals, and five hundred zines. Its museum collection includes more than five thousand objects such as suffrage banners, photographs, posters and badges. Over five hundred personal and organisational archives document campaigns from the nineteenth century to the present. In 2011 the suffrage archives were inscribed in UNESCO’s UK Memory of the World Register. The collections were formally recognised in 2007 for their outstanding national and international importance. Visitors enter a reading room with open shelves and a dedicated exhibition hall. The museum displays changing exhibitions on themes like women’s suffrage, office work and liberation movements. Public talks, film screenings and guided tours take place regularly. The library also runs reading groups, short courses and outreach sessions with schools and community groups. Its specialist staff support researchers using the archives and printed collections. The building itself, once a wash house, preserves its original façade while housing modern storage and study spaces.