Women's Library

The Women's Library @ LSE

The Women’s Library reading room in the LSE library
Country	United Kingdom
Type	Library
Established	1926
Location	Lionel Robbins Building, The London School of Economics and Political Science, 10 Portugal Street, Westminster, London, WC2A 2HD
Collection
Items collected	books, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, archives, pamphlets, drawings and manuscripts
Access and use
Access requirements	Open to anyone with a need to use the collections and services and those coming to see exhibitions
Website	The Women's Library @ LSE

The Women's Library @ LSE is Britain's main library and museum resource on women and the women's movement, especially concentrating on Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries. It has an institutional history as a coherent collection dating back to the mid 1920s, although it has existed under several different names, different parent bodies, and in different locations. Since 2013, the library has been in the custody of the London School of Economics and Political Science, which manages the collection as part of the British Library of Political and Economic Science in a dedicated area known as the Women's Library @ LSE.

The printed collections at the Women's Library contain over 60,000 books and pamphlets, over 3,500 periodical titles (series of magazines and journals), and over 500 zines. In addition to scholarly works on women's history, there are biographies, popular works, government publications, and some works of literature. There are also extensive press cutting collections.

The Library's museum collection holds over 5,000 objects including over 100 suffrage and modern campaigning banners, photographs, posters, badges, textiles, and ceramics. There are over 500 personal and organisational archives, ranging in size from one to several hundred boxes.

In February 2007, the Women's Library collections were designated by the UK Museums, Libraries and Archives Council for their "outstanding national and international importance" (the Designation Scheme is now overseen by the Arts Council). In 2011, items from the women's suffrage archives held at The Women's Library were inscribed in UNESCO's UK Memory of the World Register as the 'Documentary Heritage of the Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1865-1928'.

The Women's Library traces its roots to the London Society for Women's Suffrage, a women's suffrage organisation established in 1867. The library was first formally organised in the 1920s, with the first Librarian, Vera Douie, appointed on 1 January 1926. At this time, and for many years afterward, it was called the Women's Service Library, in accordance with the name of the society which since the outbreak of World War I had been called the London Society for Women's Service. Vera Douie remained in post for 41 years, during which time she took a small but interesting society library and turned it into a major resource with an international reputation.