The Women's Library is England's main library and museum resource on women and the women's movement, concentrating on Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries. It has an institutional history as a coherent collection dating back to the mid-1920s, although its "core" collection dates from a library established by Ruth Cavendish Bentinck in 1909. Since 2013, the library has been in the custody of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), which manages the collection as part of the British Library of Political and Economic Science in a dedicated area known as the Women's Library.
The Women's Library reading room in the LSE library
Mary Robinson (former President of Ireland) and librarian Elizabeth Chapman at the opening of the new Women's Library reading room at LSE, 12 March 2014
Ruth Mary Cavendish-Bentinck was a Morocco-born British aristocrat, suffragist and socialist. Her library was the basis for what is now the Women's Library.
Ruth Cavendish Bentinck