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25Nov

Research, archives and inspiration: reflections on The Women's Library

Hosted by LSE Library
Online public event
Wednesday 25 November 2026 1pm - 2pm

Explore stories from The Women's Library with Caitriona Beaumont at this online talk.

Over the past thirty-five years, Caitríona Beaumont has been researching archives held at The Women's Library. These collections include the organisational records of the National Federation of Women's Institutes (NFWI), the International Alliance of Women and the Six Point Group, as well as the personal papers of activists such as Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan.

In this talk, she will reflect on how The Women's Library collection at LSE Library has shaped her scholarship on histories of women's activism in Britain across the twentieth century.
This work includes her PhD research, which informed her first book Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women's Movement in England, 1928 to 1964 (MUP, 2013), her work on the welfare activism of housewives' associations, and her latest research project on the environmental activism of the NFWI from the 1920s to the present.

Caitríona will foreground the importance of access to records of women's organisations and activists, a finding linked to her AHRC-funded Women's Grassroots Activism project. Access to these archives has been essential to making the story of women's activism more widely known and to ensuring these stories are included in wider histories of the women's movement in modern Britain.

About our speaker

Caitríona Beaumont is Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Professor Emerita, London South Bank University.

Banner image: Keep Britain Tidy, Lisvane WI, ref The Women’s Library, 5FWI/B/2/2/18/17a

Further information

The British Library of Political and Economic Science, known as LSELibrary, was founded in 1896, a year after the London School of Economics and Political Science. It has been based in the Lionel Robbins Building since 1978 and houses many world class collections, including The Women's Library and the Hall-Carpenter Archives.

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