The Feminist Library is closed until March 4 2025

The Feminist Library has always relied on the labour of volunteers and the organising team. The organising team consists of 7-15 people, mostly unpaid, who are in charge of keeping the library alive: this includes admin, collections, acquisitions, social media, volunteer coordination, fundraising, and organising/promoting a whole range of events. The devastating effects of austerity and the rising levels of precarity we experience as workers means we’re unable to dedicate as much time to the library’s functioning and day-to-day operations as was possible when the library began at the height of Women’s Liberation Movement in 1975, before Thatcherism had destroyed the remaining infrastructures of social care. The precarity we experience often means that as a team we stretch ourselves beyond what is sustainable as people and an organisation.

We honour the legacy to which we belong and we understand that it is our responsibility to keep the library open, relevant and useful for the contemporary feminist movement in the U.K. We’ve been reflecting on the need to change our infrastructure and working relationships in order to make the feminist library as useful to our community as possible and sustainable longterm. We want the library to remain open for the foreseeable future, in order to do this, we need to reduce some of our output. We felt it important to communicate this to the regular users of the space.

We’ve decided to close the space until March 4th 2025, to give members of the organising collective a well deserved break, to reflect on how to improve our infrastructures so that the library remains a hub for radical, communal and collective education/organising and to dedicate some time to thinking about how to celebrate our 50th anniversary in 2025.

Our aim is to rebuild our capacity and return to full operations slowly.

Don’t worry, we’re not closing forever – we’ll be back in time for International Working Women’s Day 2025! Watch this space.

In love and solidarity,

The FL Organising team.

*Please do not try and visit the library until we reopen in March. If you email our volunteer coordinator or any of the current working groups (excluding the events team) please do not expect to receive a response before we reopen. When we return, we’ll reveal a new structure with all working groups working at reduced capacity. This will include taking on a reduced amount of volunteers for dedicated work throughout the year.

If you’d like to plan any IWD events at the library, enquire about scheduled events or any other events-related questions, please email events@feministlibrary.co.uk anytime in the New Year – expect a slightly delayed response