30 Years of Changing Minds

Three Decades of Changing Minds: Marking 30 Years of Glasgow Women’s Library

Seen from above, three people look at archive material from the GWL organisation records including posters, pamphlets, magazines and photographs, laid out on a white circular table.
GWL Origins Stories Open Archive session, 2022

Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) celebrated its 30th anniversary in September 2021. To mark the entering of our fourth decade, we were thrilled to be recipients of a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund for a two year project to interpret, safeguard and share our own 30-year heritage, enabling us to ‘look back to move forward’.

As GWL’s origins and earlier work become increasingly historic, and public interest in them as a model grows, this project – Three Decades of Changing Minds – has ensured that our institutional knowledge and own heritage is not at risk of being lost and is made available for wider public benefit. It involved many people, including past and current volunteers, while bringing GWL to new audiences. Raising awareness of key change-making milestones in our history, it has inspired the work of both established and emerging heritage and cultural projects, and has helped GWL to respond to the increasing ‘ask’ of our organisational ‘elders’ to share knowledge about who we are and how we function.

The Archive

Poster with red profile of an illustration of a woman with short hair, overlaid with black text inviting viewers to attend the launch of the Glasgow Women’s Library at 50 Hill Street, Glasgow at 10.10am on Saturday, 21st September 1991. Refreshments provided.
Glasgow Women’s Library launch poster, 21st September 1991

The archive underpins the existence of GWL. Our organisation was established, in part, to archive the material that was created by Women in Profile (WiP) in the year 1990, when Glasgow had been voted the European City of Culture. Women in Profile was a multi-faceted organisation established in response to the male dominated arts programming that was to inevitably feature in the 1990 festivities. Today we see WiP sitting at the core of GWL’s values regarding the importance of women’s, including our own organisations, history.

“All of the materials produced by GWL and Women in Profile are proof of their work in building and sustaining a community committed to feminist organising, but seeing these connections and bonds reach out internationally, before the rise of global social media and the internet as we know it now is getting to glimpse something incredibly special. It is a story I will take with me after my placement into future organising work, a reminder of the strength of community and the necessity of the work that builds and sustains it.”

Milo, student placement: read more about their experience here.
Nearly one hundred pale green boxes sit on grey metal shelves in the archive stores. In the background is a ‘women working’ sign shaped like a triangular red-rimmed road sign
Glasgow Women’s Library Organisational Records, 2024

Throughout the project we shared and captured institutional knowledge further uncovering our own history, from student placements working to catalogue the GWL organisation records, to time spent with our organisation’s founders and elders.

The video shows excerpts from our Working Memory Space sessions. Each session was designed to focus on a particular time period over the course of the last 30 years. In the first, Kate Henderson and Adele Patrick discussed GWL’s origins in the Women in Profile organisation, while the second session brought together Kate Henderson, Adele Patrick and Sue John to focus on the 1990s, more specifically GWL’s organisational development and the challenges they faced.

Stacks of archive material including A4 papers and large bankers boxes, folded posters, envelopes and a covid mask sit on a white circular table.
A selection of GWL archive material sorted during the initial appraisal, summer 2022.

The project has brought together a focus on the inwards and outwards facing work on the archive. We have taken amazing strides on the cataloguing and rehousing of materials, and a series of displays, exhibitions and events were programmed through the duration of the project.

GWL Exhibition space with four distinct orange areas outlined on the floor and walls; one features a VCR combo TV and a chair, a shelf displays books and cassette tapes, an there's an old Amstrad pc on a desk
Making Contact, Researching, and Records of Our Organisation
GWL Exhibition space with four distinct orange areas outlined on the floor and walls; one area has a desk with an old Amstrad PC, and another has a slide projector. GWL publicity materials are displayed throughtout the space
Navigating Collections, Visual Artist Communicating Ideas, Making Contact
Vinyl text on window in with light shining through, reads: 'Years Later, when Chinese cookery books became available in Britain, She discovered the secret ingredient of the dough- it was baking powder, not yeast, but by that time you could buy baos in Glasgow and she had long given up trying to make them.'
Pamela So: GWL Supporting Artist, wall vinyl recreation of writing first exhibited in GWL Trongate space, 2000
Defined orange area with desk and chair - on the desk is an Amtrad, a computer from the 1990s. A selection of black and white flyers and postcards are stuck to the wall.
Recreation of desk from early GWL space, including an Amstrad.

Made Possible with Heritage Fund