‘Lock up your libraries’? Women readers at Cambridge University Library, 1855–1923

Abstract

This article explores the admission of women readers to Cambridge University Library from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The period covered begins with the introduction of new library rules in 1854, which allowed for the formal admission of readers who were not members of the university, including women. It focuses in particular on women students, who arrived in Cambridge with the founding of the first women’s colleges, Girton College in 1869 and Newnham College in 1871. It argues that the control of access to (male) privileged spaces such as the University Library (alongside lecture halls and laboratories) was bound up with and symbolic of the status of women in the university, part of the long battle for women to be admitted as full members of the university.