Feminist Library | |
---|---|
51°28′40″N0°04′24″W / 51.477839°N 0.073382°W | |
Location | London, England |
Type | Special library |
Established | 1975 |
Collection | |
Items collected | Books, Periodicals, Pamphlets |
Size | Approx. 14,700 |
Other information | |
Website | Feminist Library |
The Feminist Library is a special collection and archive of materials related to feminist literature and activism in London and the wider UK, including books, poetry pamphlets, and periodicals. Since 2020, the library is located in the Sojourner Truth Community Centre, Peckham, Southwark, South London.
The library was founded as the Women's Research and Resources Centre in 1975 by a group of women, concerned about the future of the Fawcett Library, to ensure that the history of the women's liberation movement survived. The founders included feminist academics Diana Leonard and Leonore Davidoff. [1] [2]
The library faced a financial crisis in 2003 when Lambeth Council substantially increased the rent on the building. [3]
Four years later, in 2007, the management committee called an emergency meeting as a final attempt to gather support. The meeting was well attended and the library was saved, although it still struggles ,[ when? ] depending on grants to survive.
In January 2010, the library announced that it had received a grant from Awards for All, [4] which it intended to use to train volunteers in radical librarianship, using the library itself as a resource. In March 2010, fifteen volunteers were chosen from many applicants and they began working at the library in April 2010. One of the trainees began writing an anonymous blog about her experiences. [5]
Opening hours had increased from 2013 to 2014 but remained dependent on the availability of volunteers. In 2015 the library celebrated its 40th anniversary. [6] By 2018 it was open afternoons or evenings from Tuesday to Saturday. [7]
The Feminist Library opened in the Sojourner Truth Resource Centre in Peckham in 2020. [8]
The library started as a small collection of contemporary material, but is now considered[ by whom? ] to be the most significant library of feminist material in England. As of 2010 [update] , the collection included some 7,500 books, of which around 5,000 are non-fiction, 500 poetry publications, and 1,500 periodical titles, many self-published, taking about 85 metres of shelving. [9] There is also a large number of pamphlets, held at the Bishopsgate Institute. [10]
The amount of poetry and fiction in the library is unusual for a special collection focused on a political movement. The reason for this is that the library wanted to ensure individual women were represented as part of their liberation, as explained by Gail Chester, a member of the library's management committee, in an interview with Anne Welsh in 2007. [11]
Herstory is a term for history written from a feminist perspective and emphasizing the role of women, or told from a woman's point of view. It originated as an alteration of the word "history", as part of a feminist critique of conventional historiography, which in their opinion is traditionally written as "his story", i.e., from the male point of view. The term is a neologism and a deliberate play on words; the word "history"—via Latin historia from the Ancient Greek word ἱστορία, a noun meaning 'knowledge obtained by inquiry'—is etymologically unrelated to the possessive pronoun his. In fact, the root word historia is grammatically feminine in Latin.
A librarian is a person who works professionally in a library providing access to information, and sometimes social or technical programming, or instruction on information literacy to users.
The Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) is a trotskyist and socialist feminist political party in the United States. FSP formed in 1966, when its members split from the Socialist Workers Party.
Robin Morgan is an American poet, writer, activist, journalist, lecturer and former child actor. Since the early 1960s, she has been a key radical feminist member of the American Women's Movement, and a leader in the international feminist movement. Her 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful was cited by the New York Public Library as "One of the 100 Most Influential Books of the 20th Century.". She has written more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and was editor of Ms. magazine.
The American Library Association (ALA) is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world.
Catherine Hall is a British academic. She is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London and chair of its digital scholarship project, the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. Her work as a feminist historian focuses on the 18th and 19th centuries, and the themes of gender, class, race, and empire.
Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement is a 1970 anthology of feminist writings edited by Robin Morgan, a feminist poet and founding member of New York Radical Women. It is one of the first widely available anthologies of second-wave feminism. It is both a consciousness-raising analysis and a call-to-action. Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology (1984) is the follow-up to Sisterhood Is Powerful. After Sisterhood Is Global came its follow-up, Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium (2003).
Bishopsgate Library, now known as Bishopgate Institute's Special Collections and Archives is an independent, charity-funded library located within the Bishopsgate Institute in the City of London.
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a research library of the New York Public Library (NYPL) and an archive repository for information on people of African descent worldwide. Located at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard between West 135th and 136th Streets in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, it has, almost from its inception, been an integral part of the Harlem community. It is named for Afro-Puerto Rican scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.
The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is located on the fourth floor of the Brooklyn Museum, New York City, United States. Since 2007 it has been the home of Judy Chicago's 1979 installation, The Dinner Party. The Center's namesake and founder, Elizabeth A. Sackler, is a philanthropist, art collector, and member of the Sackler family.
Celeste (Celestia) West was an American librarian and lesbian author, known for her alternative viewpoints in librarianship and her authorship of books about lesbian sex and polyfidelity. She herself was polyamorous.
Librarianship and human rights in the U.S. are linked by the philosophy and practice of library and information professionals supporting the rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), particularly the established rights to information, knowledge and free expression.
The Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) is a New York City-based archive, community center, and museum dedicated to preserving lesbian history, located in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The Archives contain the world's largest collection of materials by and about lesbians.
The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives is a grass roots archive dedicated to collecting, protecting, and conserving lesbian and feminist women's history. The Archives was founded in 1981 as the West Coast Lesbian Collections (WCLC) by Lynn Fonfa and Cherrie Cox in Oakland, California.
Yolanda Retter was an American lesbian activist, librarian, archivist, and author.
Leonore Davidoff was an American-born feminist historian and sociologist who pioneered new approaches to women's history and gender relations, including through her analysis of the gendered division of roles in public and private spheres. She helped create the Feminist Library in London in 1975. She was also the founding editor of the academic journal Gender & History. For much of her academic career, Davidoff was based at the University of Essex in the UK, and was a Professor Emerita when she died.
Those working in the field of library science do not currently reflect the age, class, disabilities, ethnicity, gender identity, race, sex, and sexual orientation makeup of the populations they serve. There are efforts to provide a diverse working environment in libraries, with an eye towards ways to diversifying the status quo.
Interference Archive is a volunteer-run library, gallery, and archive of historical materials related to social and political activism and movements. Located in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City, at 314 7th Street, with in the zip code 11215, its mission is "to explore the relationship between cultural production and social movements."
Sherrill Cheda was an American-born Canadian librarian, feminist writer and arts administrator. She worked in a number of academic libraries in the United States and Canada before serving as chief librarian at Seneca College.
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