Women's Library Research Articles

Archives and amazons: A Quilters guide to the lesbian archive

This article offers a critical reflection on my creative engagement with the figure of the Amazon in the quilted artworks for my exhibition Archives and Amazons: quilting the lesbian archive which took place at HOME, Manchester in 2021. This exhibition was created in response to archival research at the only accredited museum in the UK dedicated to women, Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL), which holds the remnants of the now disbanded Lesbian Archive and Information Centre (LAIC) (1984–1995). I engage specifically with two representations of Amazons, from two very disparate and politically opposed lesbian publications: firstly the illustrated cover of the LAIC newsletter, and a photographic series by the artist Tessa Boffin (1960–1993). Through auto-ethnography I articulate some of the pleasures and complexities in encountering, and re-visioning the Amazons that ride within the remaining fragments of the LAIC collection. I propose the quilt as a reparative strategy for engaging with the Amazon, one that refuses to disassemble and disassociate from the difficulties of lesbian history, re-assembling the pieces through a contemporary lesbian lens.

Independent Miss Craigie: Narration and the Archive in a Documentary Biopic

This article explores the process of making a documentary about Jill Craigie which drew, in particular, on the collection of her papers at the Women's Library and on documents belonging to Craigie and her family. Independent Miss Craigie (2021) seeks to examine the scope and synergies of film-making and politics in a career which encompassed independent production, journalism, broadcasting, television and writing. Our documentary aims to evoke the tensions between Craigie's own (rather diverse) accounts of her career, the evidence of it in her papers and in the contemporary reception of her work. This article about the making of the film provides space to reflect on how archival materials can be used to construct a narrative of a woman director's career. In doing so, it highlights the inevitable gaps and elisions in archival sources and, indeed, in the interpretation of Craigie's films and come to some conclusions about Craigie's disparaging attitude to her own work in later life.

Rethinking and Re-viewing Data

Rethinking and Re-viewing Data Melanie Bigold, Marie-Louise Coolahan, and Betty A. Schellenberg the three projects we describe here seek to expand the ways in which we understand women's relationships with texts by theorizing and applying robust methodologies to the study of early modern women's book ownership, eighteenth-century women's libraries, and women's compilation of manuscript verse miscellanies. This work challenges assumptions and biases in book history—in particular, the perceived absence of evidence in terms of both the texts themselves and the textual and intellectual labor involved in their production. One of the most exciting aspects of women's book history is the variety and scope of "new" source materials hiding in plain sight in libraries and archives around the world. Although many of these items remain inaccessible to scholars for various practical reasons (location, time, and funds are always factors), often the primary barrier is conceptual: the simple perception of a lack of evidence. In fact, we have found plenty of material when searching for women-created manuscript verse miscellanies and the records of women's libraries and book ownership. The sheer numbers of manuscript or textual witnesses involved have, however, made it difficult to assess and analyze the material. We have all struggled with the problem of genre, because of both the lack of defining conceptual parameters and the idiosyncrasies of surviving witnesses. Each of our studies aims, therefore, to make some of these "new" forms of contemporary evidence accessible to more systematic study and interpretation. Such data-driven work has the potential to transform histories of reading. Like many of our colleagues in this special issue, we believe that careful framing and processing of the quantitative data is a necessary groundwork for qualitative analyses. This calls for preliminary theorizing and categorizing. We have found ourselves [End Page 165] questioning the nature of our sources (when is a book not a book?), the utility of genre designations (what does "literature" mean to the Countess of Hertford versus the Duchess of Northumberland?), and measures of popularity (why does the canon of manuscript poetry collections differ from that of print?). Recovery and making visible are important processes in women's book history; however, it is equally critical to establish standards and contexts of comparison for what is recovered. We need to build data sets large enough to allow comparison if we are to address the many generalizations and questions that pertain to women's reading, curating, and adapting of literary and popular texts. But in order to do this, we need to identify, locate, and create typologies of various genres of sources. For example, because the catalogs, book lists, wills, and inventories that are witnesses to women's book ownership and libraries use variable generic frameworks, they reveal and conceal different data. Quantitative research also asks us to assess more precisely various forms of qualitative agency in the communications circuit, whether of book collector or reader, consumer or curator, copyist or adapter. This type of work reveals that women's book history is not a "narrow" or "niche" pursuit; rather, it contributes to and intersects with scholarly understandings of class, gender, literacy, geography, generations, and communities of reading. It helps us chart the continuities and evolutions in the circulation of ideas and in economies of culture more broadly. Finally, it continues the fundamental work of book history in breaking down disciplinary boundaries as well as textual categories, such as the literary versus the popular or ephemeral. Perhaps most importantly, we also encourage the sharing and networking of data and materials for further work. Scholars of book history are sitting on innumerable files and spreadsheets that are never made public. Such valuable intellectual labor deserves more credit and could have more impact if it were easier to access, cite, and share. One of the greatest benefits of the Women in Book History symposium that gave rise to this special issue was the generosity with which everyone shared their types of evidence, their working files and databases, their failures, their successes, and their best practices. The material evidence for an expanded women's book history is waiting on the shelves of archives and libraries around the...

Ring the change

Today, 1 January 2018, I am sitting in my garden in Hobart, Tasmania, thinking about the year ahead. Among the clearest thoughts to emerge from such reflections are those related to Geographical Research and its role as the international journal for the Institute of Australian Geographers Incorporated. By my reckoning, this year marks the Institute’s 60th in the service of the discipline, and in April, the journal will have been 55 years in production.

Urban commons are more‐than‐property

AbstractUrban commons are characterised in the literature as collectively shared property in the city shaped by a context of scarce resources, population density, and the interaction of strangers. In the broader commons literature, commons appears as a verb, a noun, and a process made by practices of commoning—albeit still with a focus on property. In this paper, I argue that an understanding of urban commons as more‐than‐property is needed to recognise how present but elusive urban commons are. I use examples from interviews and observations conducted at a Women's Library to discuss how the access, use, benefit, care, responsibility, and ownership of this urban commons bring it into being through particular practices of commoning. By questioning current ways of defining urban commons, urban scholars gain a grounded understanding of the role of property, and other practices, in maintaining an urban commons over time.

Women's Studies 2.0. Italian Feminist Scholarship in the Digital Age

ABSTRACTThe Italian women’s movement of the 1970s was one of the largest and most diverse in Europe. However, after the movement's decline in the late 1970s, scholarly interest in women studies and in the history of second-wave feminism has primarily been upheld through the creation and promotion of women's archives, documentary centres and libraries. More recently, new generations of women have engaged in battles for women's rights, debates about gender issues and feminist scholarship, relying increasingly on new media technologies and social media. It is tempting to conclude that the generation gap that so often marks the relationship between different feminist generations is enhanced by such a technological divide. This article, instead, challenges this assumption by studying the case of an information-based organization that was created in the early 1980s by a group of local feminists in the Italian city of Bologna, and which adopted a strongly digital approach to historical scholarship in the early 1990s. What is the impact of a similar, digital approach to women's history on the nature of historical scholarship and the shape of the archive? Can the digital break through academic hierarchies and institutional barriers, and give a voice to those who have long remained outside of official historiography?

Study of Collection Development and Services in Women's College Libraries Affiliated to Karnataka State Women's University, Vijayapur

This study examines the usage of collection development and services in Women's College Libraries affiliated to Karnataka State Women's University, Vij ayapuruse, Karnataka, India. Here 85 questionnaires were distributed to the suitably selected librarians from the women's college libraries. Out of these, 58 (68.24%) questionnaires were returned and used for this study. The present study demonstrates and elaborates the various aspects of collection development and its services by women colleges libraries, statement showing the document collections, i.e., books, journals and journals subscription, non-book materials, opinion considered by the college while purchase of books, gifted books to the libraries, library automation software, and its services, and library and information networks. The article also highlights user's awareness about different types of services. Findings and suggestions of the study are given at the end of the article.

Voices from the Women's Library Occupation

Voices from the Women's Library Occupation

A Room of Her Own: The Woman's Library, a Footnote to New York City Library History

The revolutionary idea of a library for working women in New York City can be traced to 1830, but it remained dormant for twenty-eight years until a group of prominent New Yorkers revived the cause. In 1858 an address by Henry Ward Beecher and other influential citizens reviewed the benefits of such a library, and after two years of planning the women's library became a reality. New York City was unique in providing a library just for women; however, financial support dwindled, and it was forced to be taken over by the Women's Protective Union by 1870.

Vera ‘Jack’ Holme: cross-dressing actress, suffragette and chauffeur

This article provides a chronological account of the life of Vera Holme—a militant suffragette in Edwardian Britain, chauffeur to the Pankhursts, actress, and aid worker—focusing on the period 1900–20. The account is based largely on readings of papers, diaries and photographs within her personal archive, held at The Women's Library at the London School of Economics (LSE), as well as identifying references to Holme in secondary texts. The article traces the development of her identity as an unconventional woman by focusing on her work as an actress, driver and mechanic, her lesbian relationships and her increasingly masculine image, in the context of the women's suffrage movement and the First World War.

Beyond Words: An Embroidery in Memory of Anna Binderowska, Married 1864

Leora Auslander writes that: “Human beings need objects to effectively remember and forget; and we need objects to cope with absence, with loss and with death.” This text discusses the personal memories and thoughts about my own Jewish family history in the context of the holocaust, which are embedded in the design of a picture, embroidered in wool on canvas, that I made in the mid-1990s in memory of my great-grandmother, Anna Binderowska. The picture was displayed in the exhibition “Hand Made Tales,” curated by Carol Tulloch at the Women's Library, Whitechapel, London in 2011, when I was also asked to lecture about it at the related conference. Anna, who married in 1864 and had a large number of children, lived and died in the poor Jewish district of the Polish city of Słonim, then in the Russian Pale of Settlement. Four of her children, including my grandfather, Morris, emigrated and settled in Manchester, England in the mid-1890s. Never having been to Słonim, I invented a naive, comforting, idyllic vision of Anna's gravestone in the old Jewish cemetery in the town, under fallen leaves and a blue sky. Researching that cemetery's specific history twenty years later for Carol Tulloch's conference, I found that in July 1942, SS Brigadeführer Eric Naumann, in command of Himmler's special SS Einsatzgruppen B battalion, reached Słonim. The little town became an infamous killing ground, a place of mass Jewish slaughter and destruction. As all over Poland, the town's Jewish cemeteries, including Anna's gravestone, were smashed one by one. This text reflects finally on the fact that Naumann was tried at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal and executed in 1951. While he took no part in the Naumann trial, my father had been a member of the British prosecution team at Nuremburg and I realized that my embroidery had also been made in memory of my parents, my Jewish mother and my Welsh father.

Fawcett Saga: Remembering the Women's Library across Four Decades

Fawcett Saga: Remembering the Women's Library across Four Decades

Right Here I See My Own Books: The Woman's Building Library at the World's Columbian Exposition

Right Here I See My Own Books: The Woman's Building Library at the World's Columbian Exposition

The fall and rise of home economics education: newly available home economics archives at The Women's Library*

AbstractThis paper highlights some of the archives held at The Women's Library relating to home economics. It concentrates on the archives of the Institute of Home Economics, its successor and predecessor. It considers strengths in the collections, in particular home economics education. Although the profession ultimately failed to secure home economics as a foundation subject in the National Curriculum in 1987, it appears that food education is more important than ever, especially when we are reminded about childhood obesity in the daily news. The paper concludes that formal home economics teaching did fulfil the vitally important function of teaching young people how to feed themselves properly, and that food does provide an important part of children's education.

The Italian Digital Women's Library in the Context of Europe

The Italian Digital Women's Library in the Context of Europe

Shakespeare in Chicagoland

Shakespeare in Chicagoland Paul Hecht Troilus and Cressida Presented by Chicago Shakespeare Theatre at the Courtyard Theater on Navy Pier, Chicago, Illinois. April 13-June 24, 2007. Directed by Barbara Gaines. Scenic Design by Michael Philippi. Costume Design by Nan Cibula Jenkins. Lighting Design by Robert Wierzel. Sound Design by Lindsay Jones. Music composed by George Stiles, and arranged by David Shrubsole. Fight Choreography by Robin McFarquhar. With Stephen Ouimette (Pandarus), Kevin O'Donnell (Troilus), Chaon Cross (Cressida), James Harmes (Nestor), Greg Vinkler (Ulysses), Ross Lehman (Thersites), and Mark L. Montgomery (Hector). OthelloPresented by Writers' Theatre at the Woman's Library Club of Glencoe, Illinois. May 15-July 15, 2007. Directed by Michael Halberstam. Scenic Design by Keith Pitts. Costume Design by Nan Zabriskie. Lighting Design by Brian Sidney Bembridge. Sounds Design by Josh Schmidt. Properties Design by Ross Moreno. Fight Direction by David Woolley. With Kelly Cooper (Roderigo), John Judd (Iago), Kevin Gudahl (Brabantio, Lodovico), James Vincent Meredith (Othello), Braden Moran (Cassio), Chris Cantelmi (Duke of Venice, Gratiano), Suzanne Lang (Desdemona), Karen Janes Woditsch (Emilia), Audrey Francis (Bianca), and David Dastmalchian (Montano). Other productions discussed in this review Hamlet and Cymbeline, also at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre King Lear presented at the Goodman Theatre Hamlet presented by Signal Ensemble Theatre at the Chopin Theatre Richard II presented by Actor's Revolution Theatre at Angel Island In rural Indiana where I work, the dissonance Erwin Panofsky identified as Virgil's singular contribution to the pastoral literary tradition is often in evidence. The land is beautiful: I drive each day between corn and soybean fields, on a road slightly elevated above the fields, marked by occasional copses, windmills, farmhouses, and gentle rises and depressions (northern Indiana is not quite flat). Just north of campus the southern shore of Lake Michigan, where it has not been appropriated by steel manufacture, is sandy and idyllic. There are enormous dunes protected by the state. This is where my students spend their free time all summer long. But the land is also not without visible signs of the suffering of its inhabitants, reminders that we are part of the old rust belt where steel production has contracted enormously. Most of the farms, local farmers will tell you, are owned by large corporations. And the census figures for nearby communities and the information my school collects from its students back up the eye's impression. Opportunities for high-paying jobs are scarce; my students, many from households with incomes less than $25,000, work full-time and come to school when they can. Seventy miles west and north up that coast one arrives in Glencoe, Illinois, a community so exclusive that one feels the need for a pass or identifying badge to park and walk there. The houses are uniformly large and the lawns all tended closely, without any visible deviation. No one here seems in danger of falling off, of getting distracted and letting the lawn go to seed. The Starbucks feels like a concession to vulgar taste, tolerated but not quite approved of. There are no bars, no fast food, no signs of economic distress or privation of any kind. The harshness of life in Indiana seems a dream, the dissonance between sublime landscape and struggling humanity quite resolved. What dissonance one feels (and when I first arrived there, to see Othello, I felt dizzy, reached for my camera to try to capture the green glow of the air, the immaculate streets) comes only from the memory of the short journey it takes to reach this place. This was one among several such dizzying journeys seeking out productions of Shakespeare in the vicinity of Chicago over about a year and a half. I saw good productions, that served their plays well, helped audiences, students, and others unfamiliar with the plays to get to know them; and one production that left me full of new ideas and impressions about a familiar play. That was all fairly clear. But traversing the landscape kept raising other questions for me that were not so easily answered, and these had to do with the nature of the places on which Shakespeare was superimposed, the relationships between those places, and...

Turkish Women in Academia: Problems of Legitimacy in Trans/National Perspective

Turkish Women in Academia:Problems of Legitimacy in Trans/National Perspective Arzu Öztürkmen (bio) The study of women and history stands at the crossroad of a variety of directions. Writing the "history of women" in a particular country vis-à-vis their relation to state and society is one genre. Constructing the history of how women's studies emerged is another. There may also be feminist attempts to rewrite national historiographies in order to incorporate gender into them. Following that framework, one can state that there is substantial work on the first genre, where Ottoman and Turkish women's history has been analyzed.1 Turkish scholars have also broadly covered the history of the feminist movement within the last two decades.2 What is lacking in Turkish studies now is a feminist critique of national historiography, as was tried in Creating a Nation, where an accepted Australian national historiography was challenged through a reconsideration of colonialism and gender relations.3 Having stated these directions, this essay will focus on a different dimension of women's studies in Turkey—that of the multisited positions contemporary Turkish women academicians face in their encounters with national and international academic circles. It will try to highlight two main positions vis-à-vis Turkish women scholars: first, the discrepancy between national academics trained abroad and in national universities, and second, the problems of legitimacy in international context. Leaving aside the sporadic curiosities and nationalist publications about women's emancipation,4 scholarly interest in rethinking women's history in Turkey emerged in full force during the 1980s with the newly rising women's movement.5 This movement created its own academic programs, a women's library, social help shelters and centers, and political organizations to support women in politics. With this wave came an amount of research, which gradually led scholars toward a critique of women's status in national historiography. The Republican concept of women's emancipation apparently was not as progressive as Turkish women had so far been indoctrinated to believe; instead, this concept of emancipation was a regression from the demands and thematic richness expressed by Ottoman feminists. That such nineteenth-century Ottoman publications were in Arabic script, illegible to the Republican generation, had long postponed a thorough analysis of the Ottoman women's movement. This movement was fully aware of the rise of Western feminism and had already begun negotiating their roles and status in domestic space.6 Ottoman women debated their rights in education and political spheres, and adopted a more [End Page 173] assertive discourse than their successive Republican generations. With all its conservatism, Turkish women cherished more access to education and professional life under the Republic. Many studied abroad in different fields to return to teach in Republican universities.7 They acquired high-status jobs as the first generation of women teachers, doctors, judges, and pilots, accepting to a great extent their role as emancipated women in the public sphere. The Republican regime had also granted Turkish women their voting rights in 1934, before many European countries, a matter which had long been part of a proud national discourse. The state-controlled women's emancipation model survived until the 1970s, a period when Marxism dominated the public sphere, generating clashes between left- and right-wing groups. A group of women who questioned their position and status within the leftist movement broadened their critique towards a more gendered analysis: the wind of a general critique to the political order also brought a critique of gender.8 The women's movement accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s, with the growth of many women's nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the establishment of a Directorate General on the Status and the Problems of Women in 1990, and various campaigns on a variety of issues ranging from violence to citizenship rights. The movement created its own publications with more impact on general public debates. With the opening of thirteen research centers for women's issues and four women's studies departments since 1989, many young students also took part in research and writing, contributing to the development of an academic community. With the emergence of new power domains and relations, there soon appeared a tension between...

'They have had to come down to the women for help!' Numerical feminization and the characteristics of women's library employment in England, 1871–1974

Existing work on the position of women in English libraries illustrates the role of gender in the establishment of the profession. This paper adds to that work by addressing a gap in the published literature. It provides a broad indication of the numbers of women working in various types of library and the characteristics of their employment in terms of seniority, salaries, access to pensions and hours of work. It explores the period between 1871, when Manchester Free Library began employing women public library workers, and 1974, when local government reorganization changed the largest library workforces, those in public and county libraries.

Sapphos to Baby Dykes: A Photo‐Essay

AbstractThe LIK:T Young lesbian and Bisexual Women's Project have done a substantial piece of work looking at role models and aspirations of young lesbians and bisexual women through art.The aim of the project was to try and break down isolation, and to raise the aspirations of young lesbian and bisexual (LB) women, as often as a group, LB women have a hidden history/herstory.The work was done over a number of months, including a consultation event in Manchester with lesbian and bisexual women across the generations; a research trip to the Glasgow Women's Library (and their Lesbian Archive); and a number of pieces put together at other events around the country by our roving reporters/photographers.The exhibit created includes six posters designed by the young women involved, and a photo collection of lesbian and bisexual women from across the generations, with accompanying interviews about their loves, lives and everything.

‘In the Margins of Chaos’: Francesca Wilson and Education for All in the ‘Teachers' Republic’1

This article narrates the educational interventions of a woman teacher activist, Francesca Wilson, with displaced children and refugees in Southern Spain during the Spanish Civil War. In so doing it seeks to contribute to addressing the silences that surround the involvement of women educator‐activists in the Spanish Civil War and in international humanitarian activism. Drawing on autobiographical texts and archival resources the paper then explores issues of authorial voice and individual motivation as they are reflected in this episode in her life history. 1I would like to thank Ian Grosvenor and Kate Rousmaniere, and the staff of the Friends Library, Marx Memorial Library, Women's Library, Imperial War Museum, Cambridge University Library and Birmingham University Library Special Collections for their help and advice.