"Lock up your libraries?": Women readers of Cambridge University Library, 1869-1923

Thu 16 January 2020

Cambridge University Library

This talk from the University Library's Head of Special Collections, Dr Jill Whitelock, will explore the admission of women readers and examine how the control of access to privileged spaces such as the University Library (alongside lecture halls and laboratories) was bound up with the status of women in the University between 1869-1923.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the founding of Girton College in 1869 as Britain’s first residential college for women offering an education at degree level. In 1871, Newnham College began as a house for five students in Cambridge and its first principal Anne Jemima Clough wrote passionately about the need for access to books as part of the requirement for study.

Both Girton and Newnham built up extraordinary libraries for their staff and students, in part because access to the University Library was contested, part of the long battle for women to be admitted as full members of the University, which ended only in 1948. Until 1923, women from Girton or Newnham had to request access in the same way as non-University members (amongst them other women readers), by applying to the Library Syndicate, and it was only in 1887 that women students under the age of twenty-one were entitled to apply at all.

Cost: Free