The Fawcett Library

Q. What is it

A. The Fawcett Library is the UK's oldest and most comprehensive research library on all aspects of women in society.

�

Q. Why has it been in the news

A. It was located in an east London basement for most of its 75 years, underused and undervalued by the public at large. But, from this month (February 2002), the Fawcett Collection is finally accessible to all. It has now been housed in the magnificent four-storey Women's Library, built in an old east London wash-house in Whitechapel, using funding from a �4.2m lottery grant.

�

Q. What's the story

A. The library began as the Women's Service Library, which was the library of the London and National Society for Women's Service - now called the Fawcett Society - the direct descendant of the London Society for Women's Suffrage, which had been founded in 1867. The Society was at the centre of the non-militant wing of the campaign for women's suffrage during the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and a great deal of material from the campaign and related issues was accumulated.

�

In the 1920s the society decided to organise the material for the use of members and in 1926 the first librarian was appointed.

�

Q. Who was the Fawcett the library was named after

A. Millicent Fawcett, n�e Garrett (1847-1929), was for 50 years the leader of the movement for women's suffrage in England. From the beginning of her career she had to struggle against almost unanimous male opposition to political rights for women and from 1905 she also had to overcome public hostility to the militant suffragists led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, with whose violent methods Fawcett was not in sympathy.

�

Her father was a shipowner and political radical, who had supported the efforts of Millicent's elder sister, the pioneer woman physician and medical educator Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, to be admitted to the practice of medicine. Millicent herself married Henry Fawcett, a radical politician, who supported her work for women's rights.

�

She also was a founder of Newnham College, Cambridge (established 1871), one of the first English university colleges for women.

�

Q. What collections does the library hold

A. Other than the archive of the Fawcett Society, which originally formed the body of the collection, the library has acquired a number of other smaller collections over the years, including the Cavendish-Bentinck and Ed Wright libraries (originally suffrage collections with a high proportion of old and rare books), the Crosby Hall Collection, the Sadd Brown Library (on women in the Commonwealth) and the library of the Josephine Butler Society (formerly the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene). Papers of individuals, including Millicent Fawcett herself and her sister Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson are also housed there.

�

The second wave of feminism, the Women's Liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which, among many other things, led to the Equal Pay Act and Sex Discrimination Act, is also well represented in the library.

�

In all the library has 60,000 books and 2,500 periodicals, the latter dating back to 1745. There are self-help manuals from the 17th century and collections relating to more modern feminist campaigns, such as the Greenham Common protest of the 1980s and the movement for the ordination of women priests.

�

Recent donors to the Library include the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland (really), who left a manuscript for scholars to pore over, and the comedienne Dawn French, who has donated a tee-shirt.

�

Over the decades the library became a major national research resource, and by 1977, as the Fawcett Society could no longer manage the library, it was transferred to the City of London Polytechnic (now London Guildhall University).

�

Q. Where is the new building

The Women's Library, Old Castle Street, Whitechapel, London E1

�

For more on Arts & Literature click here

�

By Simon Smith