Women's suffrage, the Women's Library and me
Speaker
Join us in the final celebration of The Women's Library's centennial year!
To mark the end of The Women's Library centenary year, Elizabeth Crawford will talk about her association with The Women’s Library as both a researcher, author and dealer in books and ephemera.
Elizabeth first became acquainted with the collection in the 1990s, when she was researching the 400 biographies and 800 societies discussed in The Women’s Suffrage Movement: a reference guide (1999).
Subsequently, the Library has been crucial to her research for numerous talks, articles, chapters and books. For her latest book, The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign in 100 Objects: a material history (2026), the collection has been central to the selection of many of the ‘objects’ through which she narrates the history of the suffrage movement.
With a new edition of the Reference Guide commissioned for publication in 2028, she will be returning for further research in The Women's Library to discuss some of the items that passed through her hands on their way into the collection
There will be a reception and an opportunity to purchase a copy of Elizabeth's latest book.
Speaker
Elizabeth Crawford is an independent researcher and for decades ran a business selling antiquarian books and ephemera by and about women, specialising in the suffrage movement. She is the author of The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866-1928 (1999), Enterprising Women: The Garretts and Their Circle (2002), The Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland: A Regional Survey (2005), and Art and Suffrage: a biographical dictionary of suffrage artists (2018). Elizabeth received an OBE in 2018 for 'services to education' and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Chair
Ellie Whittingdale is a Fellow in Law and joined LSE Law School in 2025. Prior to this, Ellie was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (CSLS), University of Oxford. There, she worked with Linda Mulcahy on an oral history of the English and Welsh Rape Crisis movement. This was a partnership project between CSLS, Rape Crisis England & Wales, and National Life Stories at the British Library, and was funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.
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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The Women's Library at 100
