This post was written by Gillian Murphy, Curator for Equality, Rights and Citizenship, The Women’s Library, LSE. It is part of a series of posts on the theme of Women’s History in the lead up to History Day 2018.
On 11 June 2018, Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s birthday, Google Arts and Culture launched its Road to Equality celebrating the stories behind 100 years of women’s rights in the UK. LSE Library was a partner in this project which provided a great opportunity to digitise parts of our suffrage holdings contained in the Women’s Library collection.
The Women’s Library collection grew out of the suffrage movement which began in 1866 with the first mass women’s suffrage petition to Parliament. The suffrage collection follows this campaign from this date until equal voting rights with men were achieved in 1928. The Library continued to grow to what is today, a collection that charts the history of feminism.
High-quality images now available on the Google Arts and Culture platform include:
- Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s scrapbook of memorabilia.
- The archive of Louisa Garrett Anderson, niece of Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Louisa was a surgeon and suffragette who, with Flora Murray, founded the Endell Street Military Hospital in Covent Garden which cared for nearly 30,000 wounded soldiers during the First World War. This includes the Endell Street Military hospital scrapbook.
* Katie Gliddon’s prison diary. Katie was a member of the Croydon branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union and was involved in the window-smashing campaign in March 1912 and went to prison. She brought her copy of Shelley’s poetry into Holloway along with a smuggled pencil and wrote her diary in the margins of the volume.
- Vera ‘Jack’ Holme’s volume contains speeches at the Royal Albert Hall on the release of Emmeline Pankhurst from Holloway in March 1908.
- The diary of Margery Lees with details of her journey on the Women’s Suffrage pilgrimage organised by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in 1913.
- Items from Elsie Duval’s archive including a scrapbook of photographs and prison letters.
We were also able to highlight some of the relatively-unknown suffrage stories which are contained in our archives. You can read about the suffrage banners designed by Mary Lowndes for the NUWSS procession on 13 June 1908; the Women’s suffrage pilgrimage which ended in July 1913; the tragic story of campaigners Hugh Franklin and Elsie Duval; the life of Rosa May Billinghurst and others in online exhibitions. You can have a look at all the images and read a longer editorial piece on the independent feminist press.
For more about women’s suffrage at LSE.