A Feminist Library Says Hello To Time

Note: this was written in 2016.

The Glasgow Women’s Library first officially came into the world in 1991 as a two-room offshoot of The Mitchell Library. Today, twenty-five years later, it has a building of its own just off from Glasgow Green that regularly plays host to English-language classes, tea that can be made at a moment’s notice, tentative discussions to tend bees on the roof, and more. A corner of that building has carved black-seeming obsidian that celebrates when women won the right to vote. There is a wall of art facing the building that highlights an Inuit tale celebrating a woman’s strength in the face of overwhelming abuse across the way from the doors. A little further down are signs where the women of different parts of Glasgow express solidarity with each other.

A knee-high sandwich board stands outside the entrance. It’s chalked up. After passing over stone steps, there are the doors, wooden things, which swing open to the main space and the books.

A random selection of the items on the shelves includes Women of China, Cuban Women Now, Moscow Women, Baghdad Sketches, The Suppression Of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, The Golden Notebook, The Female Eunuch, When God Was A Woman, In Favor Of A Sensitive Man, The Spare Rib Reader, and one — Jill Posener’s Spray It Loud — that features a woman leaning…