On being a writer...


A celebration of the writing process, of being a writer, of all the weird things that pass through a writing brain...


Monday 7 May 2012

The Women's Library

This library is under threat unless it finds a new home.  Yet another disaster for our cultural history and especially for women.  The point is that women need a library to store their past.  When I was researching 'The Crimson Rooms', which is about a pioneering woman lawyer of 1924 the Women's Library was the one place where I could find a record of what a woman lawyer's life might have been like at that time.  There are lots of records and memoirs of male barristers, not of women doing the same work.  They were too busy, probably.  They didn't have a sense of themselves as doing anything momentous. 

History is male.  We keep all the male paraphernalia of war and politics and change.  Yesterday my Aunt Nora produced the telegram sent her grandmother to say that Uncle Charlie had been killed in action.  There is not record of the grandmother's response. Just that carefully folded slip of paper. 

We need the other half of history. 
http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/thewomenslibrary/

2 comments:

  1. You're making up for it now, Katharine.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Why, thank you Brian. But can only manage bite-sized chunks.

    How are you doing?

    ReplyDelete