Concern as The Women’s Library moves

Exactly how frequently favorable will its new home be?

The bear on to save The Women’s Library gained renewed brawniness on Inter interior(a) Women’s Day when a root word of 70 feminist activists occupied the building on ageing Castle Street in Aldgate.

The program library houses a quaint record of women’s history, comprising over 60,000 books and pamphlets, 3,500 periodicals.

It besides has over 5,000 objects of interest, including campaign banners from the suffrage department and documents related to the Greenham Common Women’s wild pansy Camp.

Indeed, so important is the collection that items from the women’s suffrage history were inscribed into UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

In early 2012, The Women’s Library  faced permanent closure when the troubled capital of the United Kingdom Metropolitan University, former custodians of the archive, announced that they could no longer collapse to operate the facility.

In November 2012, London Metropolitan invited bids from interested institutions and a proposal of marriage from the London School of Economics (LSE), which guaranteed the collection a drift in its existing academic library at the LSE’s campus in central London, was deemed the most acceptable.

At its current 10 year-old purpose-make location in East London, The Women’s Library is entréeible from street-level, a design characteristic  which strengthens its ties with the local community, as puff up as facilitating the collection’s accessibility.

So after the initial relief that the collection’s transfer to LSE would keep the historical documents in the public domain, its new home – on the fourth take aback of an academic building – has raised concerns make fullly exactly how publicly accessible that domain will actually be.

As Dr Laura Schwartz, Assistant prof of Modern British History at the University of Warwick, explained: “I’ve no doubt [the] LSE will well look after collections, exactly The Women’s Library is about more(prenominal) than just pieces of paper. It is about the people who use it and the place where it lives.

“The removal of the collections to [the] LSE will expose accessibility, putting an end to a decade of community and outreach fiddle in the local playing field.

“Women deserve a library of our own, and this is a real step backwards for those who fought to give women and their struggles due recognition.”

Save The Women’s Library has been campaigning to protect the archives since they first came at a lower place threat in 2012.

Hosting a tribute event at the end of last year, they used the large external jetty outside the building to project a continuous bombard of images from the campaign, as well as relevant feminist quotes, and a film made by a local girls’ aim at the library.

Not only will this kind of community instalment be impossible at LSE, but it is also unlikely that the girls’ school – not to mention countless others in the area – will have the same open and welcoming access at the new site.

Using International Women’s Day at a fitting juncture, feminist activists from Occupy, UK Uncut, Solidarity Federation, and Disabled People Against Cuts linked to form Reclaim It!, taking direct action against the move and highlighting the unprecedented toll that the government’s nonindulgence regime is having on women.

“Much of [The Women's Library] archive documents women’s struggles for equality.

“At a m when women are bearing the brunt of this government’s savage cuts, cuts which compound the gender inequality of our society, this history is more important than ever,” said lecturer and library user Josie Foreman.

Their lineage of the historic East End site, however, did not involve blockades or barricades; instead the doors were left wide open so that the public could have continued access – an ethos in keeping with the library’s own.

Protestors organised a full timetable of events, which ranged from a tilt on the future of activism to a performance called ‘Theatre of the oppress’ and a self-defence workshop.

As the occupation entered a second day, it also extended the library’s exhibition ‘The Long environ to Equality – Treasures of The Women’s Library‘, which had been due to close on International Women’s Day.

High Court bailiffs and police brought the occupation to an end, ultimately dragging the “defiant” protestors from the building amid cheers of support from the hundred-strong crowd wait outside.

The Women’s Library is due to close its doors for the last time in East London on 22 troop 2013.

We can only hope that the relocation does not close the doors on the huge steps that this unique facility has made ‘to redress the long-term invisibility of women in history and national heritage’.

 

Materials taken from Womens Views on News