Inside Glasgow Women’s Library with Dr Adele Patrick

Dr Adele Patrick takes us on a moving journey through some of the unique and surprising treasures inside Glasgow Women’s Library.

The Glasgow Women’s Library is home to extensive and rich collections celebrating and exemplifying women’s lives, achievements, and contributions in Scotland and beyond. It is the only resource of its kind in Scotland and a true national treasure. The library supports thousands of women across Scotland every year to improve their lives through their services and programmes, including support and activities that tackle a wide range of issues from poverty and women’s health, sexuality and surviving violence.

Sitting down with the RSE Head of Communications, Iagan MacNeil, Dr Adele Patrick, RSE Fellow and Co-founder of Glasgow Women’s Library, shares the library’s inspiring history and speaks about the constellation of communities, local and international, that have formed around the library, contributed to its successes, and been impacted by its work.

This film premiered for International Women’s Day 2023.

Iagan MacNeil
Hello, I’m Iagan MacNeil of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and to mark International Women’s Day we’ve come to the Glasgow Women’s Library and to meet their codirector Dr Adele Patrick. So Adele, first of all, tell us a bit about yourself and how do you become involved with this amazing resource?

Dr Adele Patrick
Well, I suppose a good starting point was really when Glasgow was nominated as European City of Culture in the mid ’80s. I was a recently graduated student from Glasgow School of Art, and myself and quite a few other people were sensing that unless we did something, the City of Culture year might just celebrate men, and that maybe there was an opportunity to really sort of, in this almost like refiguring of Glasgow as a cultural capital, there was an opportunity to celebrate some of the more hidden cultural figures, the artists, the writers, those that had been involved in making culture, but also those that were around at the time who were making the cultural work of that particular point in history. And how proud are you of what you’ve achieved in that time?

Well, honestly, every day is just a remarkable day in the Women’s Library, it must be said, and I feel like pinching myself all the time because it has grown from an absolutely grassroots organisation, where I think the first decade we were all volunteers, into a really remarkable collection. It’s been the effort of very, very many people involved in this process. But yeah, I am really proud of what we’ve achieved in that period.

Iagan MacNeil
So Adele, we’re gonna explore various elements of the library here, but first of all, we’re gonna look at the history of this facility and the work that you do. So you’ve got three objects in front of us that you feel represent that, tell us about them.

Dr Adele Patrick
Yes, I mean, I suppose the library is almost like a kaleidoscope representing very many different people, and almost like the way that individuals have made it their own. It occurs to me over the years that people have, when they hear Glasgow Women’s Library, a lot of people just almost have a vision of what it will be for them and consequently make it that. So it’s quite a strange, complex organisation with lots of different facets. I suppose one thing that makes it different from your average local lending library or even a university library or other resources like that is that very many creators been involved in it, and often creators working with the very different communities that are a part of our library life. So this object here, for example, is one of my favourite objects. There’s thousands of those. But this was an object created in relation to different communities that we we’re working with at the time in 2018. So this was a work that was made by a woman called Fiona Jack, an artist, whose great aunt was a really remarkable suffragette called Helen Crawfurd. And one of the statements that Helen Crawfurd made was this idea of that almost like culture and society was quote “in the hands of the proletariat”, and this is inscribed on this stone, and thousands of these stones were made or collected and polished by our volunteers, and then had this inscription in them, and then these were given out to people. They made a almost like a cairn in the middle of the library and people took them away. And the reason it’s a stone is because Helen Crawfurd was one of the suffragettes who threw a stone through the Prime Minister’s window as part of the campaign to get the vote. So we’re not advocating that people do that with this stone, but I suppose it’s like thinking about these actions that are made by individuals, not really wellknown people, but these culminate in the changing of the law, the changing of the rights that we have as individuals. So we’re really sort of in favour of this idea of political literacy here and cultural literacy as well. So finding out about an artist like this is as important to us as people finding out about maybe their political rights.

Iagan MacNeil
And what else do we have in front of us?

Dr Adele Patrick
Well, I mentioned the early origins of the Women’s Library and this is certainly a really important starting point. So this, although it says Women in Profile, this is almost like the place where the idea of the library was incubated. So Women in Profile was the project that was set up in the the lead up to Glasgow being City of Culture to really try and organise a whole series of events, projects, and so on that would take place during the City of Culture year. But you can see that these are extremely humble premises. You know, there are no windows.

Certainly not as grand as the building we’re in at the moment.

Oh, my goodness, I like to look at this at various points just to remind myself and others about a vision that you can have about creating spaces. Somebody was talking the other day in an interview about the idea of rehearsing freedoms in these visionary type of spaces. So that’s a really evocative term. I like to use that really in thinking about these things ’cause there was no other place like this when we started off. So it really was about like how could you imagine somewhere where you could do the types of things that we can do today in our space?

Iagan MacNeil
And the blocks, very symbolic.

Dr Adele Patrick
Yes, exactly, I mean these are another really, I think, beautiful object. Just as you can see that it’s important to have stuff, you know, and things that you can hold, and yeah, these blocks, when we moved into this beautiful building it was already a place that there was a lot of goodwill attached to it. I think a lot of local libraries, this was a former Carnegie lending library for the local area that were in just now, but when we moved in, we did have to make some changes to the building, including making it accessible and so on and so forth. And we needed to raise a little bit of money at that time. And my colleague Sue John landed on this idea of having ‘women on the shelf’. And this is sort of like recycled wood, but what you can see when you look at these beautiful objects are women who have been, whose names or organisations have been added to the block. And then a little bit of information here as well. So in this instance, this is Glasgow Women’s Aid East, and I don’t know if you want to read that.

Iagan MacNeil
It’s in memory of Val Corral and Christina McGeachy, colleagues of GWAE.

Dr Adele Patrick
Great, so this is the colleagues of people who are involved in Glasgow Women’s Aid East and have actually decided that these people did something really significant and they deserve to be sitting on the shelf in the Women’s Library. So I don’t know how many, there are hundreds of these now all around the library. And as I’m looking over just now and seeing the Smith sisters there, sitting in the area that says science, technology, engineering and mathematics. So people can decide where on the shelves, which shelves their aunt is sitting in, or an activist that they knew, or somebody who might have contributed to this idea of this hidden history of women’s achievements in all different disciplines. So when people come in, they’re learning about individuals as well as sort of going, as you might do in a local library and taking books out on loan, you’re actually absorbing through osmosis all these remarkable people as well.

Iagan MacNeil
And having been round myself, I’ve done that. I’ve read as much on the blocks as within the books. It’s so fascinating to get those stories. And actually, how important is it that women and girls share their stories and share their experiences, and that intergenerationality?

Dr Adele Patrick
Oh, my goodness, I think they’re rare, aren’t they? The spaces where it’s naturally occurring that people from very different backgrounds, very different ages, very different identities, ethnicities and so on, can actually sit in a space and make friends with others and can learn from others. So there’s a lot of that peer learning going on, a lot of that sort of almost like learning through other people’s sharing of lived experiences of one sort or another. And that’s something that I think is really rare and really, really important to sustain in the organisation as we look to our next sort of 30odd years, hopefully, of development.

Iagan MacNeil
Now, art is a big theme within the library. How important have the arts, and creative arts in particular, been with regards to women’s activism in the past and also present, and what role is there for the arts in the future of women’s rights and women’s activism?

Dr Adele Patrick
That is an extremely pertinent question for us here in Women’s Library. A really, really important one for us. And it’s quite unusual actually, to have a library space or a museum and an archive run by artists, and I’m an artist and the other codirector is an artist as well. Both of us trained at Glasgow School of Art, and we’ve, I think right from the outset, we’ve woven in and braided in artists, agency, writers, filmmakers, even architects. And I think your question is a really important one in terms of if you think about the different constituencies, different people who come into the library, some of them are not confident readers, some of them are not confident with English, using English to communicate. So it’s been really important to have creatives come up with the ways that people could actually have an in into the collection. So this is not a place where we’d be saying, “You need to read that,” “You need to, you know, read all those books before you can participate.” We need to find ways at all times for people to feel involved and feel like their histories are really significant to us. So artists have really provided that. So I was thinking actually, as you were speaking, about one example of an artist called Nicky Bird who we worked with, we worked with her on a couple of occasions, but had actually done this beautiful project about what an archive is, ’cause we’re a recognised collection of national significance now, we’re an archive, we’re a museum. And to say to people we want you to be involved in an archival project could be very daunting. But she started off by saying, “What have you kept at home? What have your family kept, what have they chosen to keep? Bring in an object, bring in something.” And that’s a starting point for people sort of understanding why we might keep things. Because most people keep something, you know, they will keep a wee precious thing that might be a child’s booty or, you know, a ticket that they used to escape, you know, a violent context, or, you know, it can be fragments, items of clothing or whatever. So people speaking about those things in their own language was a starting point for a really beautiful project some years ago, but it really has illustrated to me how important it is sometimes to have an artist working with you, thinking through these ideas of how might people best get involved in our work.

Iagan MacNeil
Now, there is so much more to find out about this amazing facility. So we’ll move on and we’ll go and find out about the community element of the organisation.

Dr Adele Patrick
Thanks.

Iagan MacNeil
So Adele, we’ve moved to the very aptly named Community Room of Glasgow Women’s Library. But tell me why are places like this so important in today’s society?

Dr Adele Patrick
Yeah, I mean, I really feel like they’re more important than they ever were. So it’s quite unusual to have a free space that can be accessed by all that is genuinely, actively welcoming people through the door. And I think we certainly are thinking about this space as almost like beyond the warm hub. I know that this is something now in terms of, you know, the cost of living crisis and so on. But I think the Women’s Library is always endeavoured to try and make sure that people feel at home. It’s almost like that’s the most frequent expression that people use when they talk about using our space that they do feel absolutely at home here. And I think for many people who are maybe experiencing challenging situations, whether that’s in the workplace or at home or as a result of the chaos, and the churn that’s in the world for all of us today, just having a space where people can’t think, they can be experiencing stimulating, and exciting, and inspiring events and so on and so forth. But just to sort of feel that this space has been designed with them in mind. There’s so few spaces I think that are like that.

Iagan MacNeil
The library very much feels part of the the community around us. How much does the community actually get involved in the daytoday life of what goes on in the building?

Dr Adele Patrick
It’s taken time. I think about a year before we moved in, we drew a onemile radius ring around the library and made sure that we spent about a year getting to know people in hairdressing salons or local community centres to, you know, all the places where our neighbours hung out and asked them, how do you feel about us moving in? And also we’re asking maybe our regular users how they felt about us moving into Bridgeton. And we had options, but we felt like this is a place that we want to be. And it’s turned out to be a really, really fantastic move. We measure the way that people feel about us in our locale with things like, is there any graffiti on the building? Well, there isn’t. 10 years down the line. But also we noticed very early on with the rise in volunteers coming and using the library also local women coming into events, families using our space for events and getting involved in lots of different activities in the library, we noticed that our neighbours were doing things like weeding the front of the building without being asked

Iagan MacNeil
Voluntarily.

Dr Adele Patrick
To do that. Yeah. So I think these things are, I suppose, it’s beyond the monitoring and evaluation form. It’s like, well, actually people appreciate what we’re doing here and understand what we’re doing, and that it has got some benefit for them and their families. So they’re very subtle measures. But I think we can say that 10 years down the line, this is a project that people feel proud of, and they feel engaged in, and are bringing their own memories and thoughts. We certainly have people saying, “I remember being locked in this building when I was a wee boy,” you know, “in the 1950s or whatever.” So it was a building already had a lot of really fantastic goodwill associated with it. So we’ve tried to build on that.

Iagan MacNeil
Now, focusing on the community theme, what elements or items within the library really are emblematic of that community aspect?

Dr Adele Patrick
Yeah, I mean, I suppose over here, we’ve got these lovely example of volunteers in the library. So everybody who works in the library, all the volunteers, all the staff wear these badges, and I think we’ve got about 80 to 100 volunteers are working in the library each year with us, and now about 25 staff. So together we are the composite of what the Women’s Library is today. So we are almost together what the Women’s Library is. So, it’s not a project that’s about me or about other senior managers, or the board, or particular staff. It’s the composite of what we’re all bringing at this time in history. So obviously, this is a community of sorts. I like to think about the library as being offering something in our locale, offering something across Scotland and being part of almost a constellation, a community that’s a global one as well. So we’re connecting with people locally and globally.

Iagan MacNeil
And what else do we have here?

Dr Adele Patrick
Well, yes. I mean, we’re in the process just now of celebrating, yeah, just past our 30th birthday, and these incredible things are coming to light that are reminding me of the types of incredible activities that we’ve been involved in over the years, and I think in the mid 90s, we acquired the National Lesbian Archive that had formally been in London. The biggest collection of its type in the UK, and I suppose people have been making pilgrimages really to our collection, not just the the lesbian archive but other remarkable resources that we’ve got. And one of the people who visited us some years ago, this is her looking like a fabulous dandy brandishing a Robert Burns anthology is an artist called Diane Torr. And I suppose there’s some figures that are ahead of their time. And Diane was one of those people, a creative, who had cut her teeth in New York. Actually a Scot but had grown up in New York and was a pioneering performance artist, had developed these things called drag king workshops. And now, with all the gender fluidity and so on and so forth, this is a very, very current theme. But Diane held these drag king workshops that were really about how the body performs a certain type of idea about what gender might be. And I remember her showing us some videos of President Bush and saying, “Look at the way that this person uses their body, look at the way that this person uses their voice and silences, and so on and so forth.” And quite a lot of us and quite a lot of young people who are involved in the time got involved in these drag king workshops. So we’re just sort of uncovering these remarkable photographs of the activities that we were doing in the 1990s that really speak to some of the concerns that people have today around what gender is, and how gender is a performative type identity.

Iagan MacNeil
Yeah, now, we know there’s a beautiful building, but you’ve got a scale model here.

Yes.

Iagan MacNeil
In front of us showing the various compartments and components of the building which is, in itself, very historic to the local area.

Dr Adele Patrick
Yes, and as I mentioned earlier on, this is a building that’s got a hell of a lot of goodwill associated with it. So we’re really aware that we want to make sure that people could still use every nook and cranny could. And the building could be used to its fullest extent, so this huge space here was the former gentlemen’s lending library, and then a significantly smaller space in the front of the building was the ladies’ reading space.

Iagan MacNeil
No surprises, no surprises, unfortunately.

Dr Adele Patrick
But we gave our architects almost like an impossible brief in one space to create a space where we could fundraise, we could have parties, we could have events, conferences, wonderful performances, but also we could have space for our growing collections. So now, as I say, our collection is of national significance. So to know that the space is offering conservation, secure space for items that are really, really precious is a really important thing. I think there have been significant milestones like when the collection started off in my home, you know, knowing that it was out of my home was and too big to ever go back in my home was a really important point, but also sort of moving into a space where we could actually safeguard the materials, that humidity, fire, and so on and so forth that it’s now in a great space, but also spaces for people to come and work, and do their research, and to enjoy the collections has been really important. Also, gallery spaces as well. We’ve got two gallery spaces now in the library space as well. So it’s definitely more than a library now.

Iagan MacNeil
Yeah, now we couldn’t come to this room without talking about what’s behind us. Tell us a little about this item.

Dr Adele Patrick
Well, as you mentioned earlier on, this is the community room, but we worked with another artist, Olivia Plender, for the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Arts. And wee while ago on an amazing project called The Life Support Project, and my colleague, Caroline Gausden, worked really closely with Olivia. Olivia works in a really particular way, and she wants to do something that we wanted and we needed in this space. So it was a really beautiful space, but it needed a little bit more of that Glasgow Women’s Library special love and attention. So she was looking at a specific book in our collection that’s come out in very many editions over the years. It’s a feminist classic, and it’s called, “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” And it was almost a book that was a real sort of loadstar for a lot of women who were discovering about their bodies like beyond the pathologized women’s body. So Olivia took this book and made a whole lot of interventions into our space. She’s somebody who’s really interested in chronic illness and around what bodies mean in today’s society. So she was particularly interested in the latest edition which is about trans bodies. And this is an image of the women who’ve translated, “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” And in this latest edition, this trans edition. So it was almost like a homage to almost like the labour that feminists have done over the years to sort of like really make movement change. And the beautiful colour around this space as well is symbolic. She had this space painted in a colour that she’s called Lavender Menace which has got all these associations with suffragette history and with queer history in Scotland as well. So we really love to work with artists who are almost like actively listening to what we in our communities need. And in this case, it was really literally, we needed a space where we could maybe show more films. So she’s made a beautiful screen and storage area here as well. And something that when you come into the space reminds us of our, almost like the heritage that we’re building the library on.

Iagan MacNeil
What are the barriers that women face in participating in society, and how do we break them down in order to assist them with their learning and their self development?

Dr Adele Patrick
I think it’s critical to sit alongside what people are now learning in schools, which they never were before or learning, maybe in further or higher education. Some people are still maybe feeling disappointed with the experience that they had within education or have not had the benefit of learning about things that are really essential to their own sense of self. So again, you might think, well, the Women’s Library is our job done. What we’re experiencing at the moment is an unbelievable growth in the number of people who are contacting us or are using our space. They’re contributing thier materials to our collections. So we feel like maybe our time has come. We’re really excited about what we might develop in the future in terms of almost like supplementary educational experiences as well. We’re talking about feminist summer schools and so on and so forth. So I think that we can build now on what we’ve done over the last few decades and really offer something that is still vital to people’s sense of defining and discovering themselves.

Iagan MacNeil
Now, what do you feel are the barriers to women fully taking part in society, and how do we overcome them, and actually just get rid of them?

Dr Adele Patrick
Well, they are still multiple. So almost like beyond what we call now, the protected characteristics, you know, so I would say that class is still an issue. I think homelessness is an issue. Everything from homophobia, transphobia, racism, these issues are still absolutely and utterly real for people and can be barriers to accessing even a place like this. The perceptions of what you’re gonna find when you come into a space that is called Glasgow Women’s Library. So we really work hard to try and make sure that the barriers that people might encounter in other settings, whether that’s museums, libraries, archives, the education sector are ones that we can try and minimise as much as possible, but it’s still a work in progress, and it’s really important that people feel like they can say when they’re not finding this as friendly a space as possible. We always hope that that is gonna be the case, but I think you have to be actively listening to what people are saying. So I think as a result, over the years we’ve changed enormously. You know, I’ve learned loads of things about whether it’s to do with neurodiversity or about dyslexia or about the barriers that are faced by asylum seeker, refugee women, or, you know, there’s always something to learn, you know, so we are trying to remain humble in those contexts and not assume that the work is done.

Iagan MacNeil
And before we move on, what’s the typical reaction to you when you tell people what your job is and where you work?

Dr Adele Patrick
Well, do you know? I think that projects that have grown from the grassroots make it almost impossible to define your workplace, you know, because you haven’t been at almost like a soundbite idea that’s been created within a council, committee meeting, so it’s really interesting to say, “Well, what is a women’s library?” And what I’m happy about is that almost every one of our volunteers and all our staff might answer that differently. And actually, now, from it being quite a frustrating thing to say, well, we’re not just in Glasgow, we don’t just work in Glasgow, we’re not just for women and we’re not just a library. That actually, I feel like it opens up a bigger conversation for people that it is a very complex animal, you know? But yeah, I feel like I’ve, yeah, I know it’s been said in loads of different contexts, but I do have the best job in the world.

Iagan MacNeil
I don’t think I would argue with you on that. Now, we’re gonna move on to the final section of our conversation and very aptly for International Women’s Day, we’re gonna look at the international dimension of the facility.

Dr Adele Patrick
Great.

Iagan MacNeil
Adele, we turn to the final section of our conversation and looking at the international dimension
Of the Women’s Library here in Glasgow. How did a library in Glasgow become such an international space?

Dr Adele Patrick
Do you know, during the 1990 period when the library was incubating we had some visitors to Glasgow from Germany and they were women’s libraries and they came to celebrate this 1990 festival that had organised and we really got the bug. So we went to visit them and discovered this almost like role models that existed outside of the UK. So there were some projects in the UK that we were aware of but it was actually these international models that really captured our imagination. And I suppose that’s a thread that’s braided its way through the whole of the library’s history. So we’ve always been on the lookout for projects that share our values internationally. So at the moment, for example we’ve got a really fantastic relationship that’s developed over the last few years with Book Bunk, an amazing project in Kenya. And more recently we’ve actually developed this incredible link with Beirut based projects as well called Haven for Artists. So these are almost like naturally occurring connections as I say, with projects that really share the same type of North Star as we do in our projects in Glasgow.

Iagan MacNeil
Now you mentioned the the Beirut Project and

Dr Adele Patrick
Yes.

Iagan MacNeil
How does international work and International Women’s Day relate to the work you do here? I know you’re you’ve got some examples to show how that connection exists.

Dr Adele Patrick
Yes, I mean, I suppose for us International Women’s Day is every day, you know, so it’s it’s almost like a part of the breathing and and breathing out of the library. So just very recently we had an opportunity one of my colleagues, an archivist in the in the library, May, got an opportunity to visit our wonderful sister project in Beirut. And of course with each of these connections we’re bringing back materials that get added to the collection. So for that, in that instance we managed to get these absolutely exquisite really quite rare materials from a project that is developing and incubating almost like in the same way that our project did although years ago in 1990, but in a very specific context but again, with artists really involved in the work. So these are really precious additions to our collection and even if it’s a fairly young project, we’re learning from the work of our colleagues in these settings. So yeah, it’s a very exciting way of evolving a project almost like thinking about what is relevant for our locale but also thinking about these almost satellite projects or constellations is a better word constellations of projects that are growing collections working with local people but also developing some aspects that are connecting with our own.

Iagan MacNeil
And tell us about the Vanessa Baird exhibition.

Dr Adele Patrick
So yes, we’re so happy to have Vanessa Baird who’s got Scots heritage, is actually based in Scandinavia or based in Norway actually choosing to show her work for the first time in Scotland in a space like our own. I mean, it’s still sort of unbelievable to me that an artist of that calibre and so internationally renowned would choose to show in a former lending library in Bridgeton is still sort of quite an amazing project, but an amazing idea for us. But yeah, we’re really pleased when artists like Vanessa Baird or like Ingrid Pollard who has just been nominated for the last Turner Prize are taking up residencies here, being commissioned and showing their work in our space. So it’s absolutely wonderful, and wonderful for local people to feel like these things are happening that it’s not just fantastic local projects like the Glendale Women’s Cafe, you know from the south side of the city celebrating their 10th anniversary here with this lovely show. We love the idea of really well regarded artists and local artists and local projects being shown in our space.

Iagan MacNeil
Now, one of the exhibits I found really fascinating was the model house which is really, really interesting, you know and those women’s perspective on on the places they came from. Tell us a bit about that.

Dr Adele Patrick
I suppose Syma Ahmed, who’s one of our longest serving staff team members in the early years of her project, which was looking at black women’s experiences and minority ethnic or minoritized women’s experiences in Glasgow had been really curious about the fact that women who migrated to Glasgow in the fifties and sixties and seventies, that there was no record really of their lives and their experiences. So she sat about doing a wonderful project that involved an artist, again, Sadia Gul and encouraged women, some of whom had not got lots of confidence in English, but at loads and loads of important heritage to share, to work on a project where they were making a composite of almost like the houses that they remembered leaving in South Asia before coming to to Glasgow for the first time. They also brought into that project, a project called She Settles in the Shields, the items that they decided to bring with them when there was some thought that they would never be going back home again. So what would be the object that you would actually bring with you? So I think it’s a measure of the trust that Syma developed working with these wonderful women that those women loaned their items in an exhibition that went along with with the model house and also a publication that’s celebrating its its 10th anniversary this year

Iagan MacNeil
And the Makar, was a former Makar was also involved.

Dr Adele Patrick
Oh yeah. So this model house became something that really generated all these oral histories that we captured as a woman who were making this beautiful object. And the model house became something that people would notice when they came in the library. And we did invite Jackie Kay along with 20 other writers and 21 artists to celebrate our 21st anniversary some years ago. And Jackie Kay spotted this model house and was really moved by the story that it told. And she wrote a poem that was inspired by the Model House and that was also translated into Urdu. So I think really, really poignant for the women involved to know that the Makar the former Makar had actually landed on their work and found it so moving.

Iagan MacNeil
And I can imagine they were very proud of of that fact.

Dr Adele Patrick
Oh, absolutely proud to be seen as having a a history that was worth recording in the way that we went about that project. And Syma went about that project also that a book was written about them and their lives and that it remains, you know that this is something, it wasn’t just a passing project that it’s actually recorded now in history the history of the making Glasgow their home.

Iagan MacNeil
And how can we ensure that women from diverse backgrounds have an opportunity to participate in international communities?

Dr Adele Patrick
I think that it’s really important for us to sort of recognise, again, this term ‘barriers’ you know, what are the barriers for participation? And I think it’s important that now especially when people feel maybe isolated or they feel that their struggles are just their own that we understand that the glocal in all of this that the barriers that people might face in Bridgeton whether that’s around housing issues or whether it’s around childcare or around education or whatever are the things that are inhibiting people living their full lives, are ones that are shared globally. And it does feel as though that it’s a very febrile political, social and cultural landscape and uncharted waters ahead. So I think the more that we understand that we are all living in the world and trying to make our way and trying to find ourselves it’s never more important than than now to sort of, for example discover what people are experiencing, Beirut and for people to discover what’s happening in Glasgow, you know? So I think these conversations are really really critical to have especially when maybe there are threats to some of the hardwon rights that have been gained over the years by women campaigning and by black and minority ethnic people campaigning all over the world. So it’s really, really important for us to understand our neighbours better and understand the struggles that are impacting on people in these global settings.

Iagan MacNeil
And how important is it that communities learn from each other not just down the road, but other side of the world?

Dr Adele Patrick
Absolutely critical. I mean, I’m mindful that now so much of the work in the library is focused not just on equalities but on environmental awareness. And it seems to me that who better to ask than, for example women who’ve got heritage in Pakistan might be able to tell us more about climate change and the impacts on communities today that many of the people that are living in Glasgow have got a Pakistani heritage are actually knowing from lived experience what neighbours what family members and others are experiencing now in a in a country where two thirds of the land mass has actually been impacted by floods. So I think there are very many subtle and and important ways that we can learn from each other. So yeah, that’s an ongoing ongoing discussion and ongoing focus for us.

Iagan MacNeil
And how can culture and the arts challenge the intersectionalities and and bring people together?

Dr Adele Patrick
I think that culture has a vital role to play. I was thinking about this in terms of our developing collections and the artists that we’ve worked with and so on. I’m really hoping that we can develop a more culturally literate political and civic representation but also for people who are involved in in cultural and identity politics to learn more about almost like the political literacy that’s evident across the whole collections here. So those two things, cultural literacy political literacy, absolutely vital. As we get to grips with the unbelievably complex terrain I think each person who comes through the door here in the women’s library is a complex individual cannot be categorised. Everybody is completely unique. And I think that it’s a big ask of any cultural organisation to respond to the needs of each individual but I think that’s what we need to do, you know, so but I think in the longer term culture is vital to be supported as well. So I’m really excited about encouraging people to who have got a cultural background to go into politics and for politicians to get to know more about what the cultural agency is in an organisation like our own and other cultural organisations.

Iagan MacNeil
Now for three decades the Women’s Library has been part of the Glasgow community. What’s your hopes for the future of the library and and women in general within society over the next coming three decades?

Dr Adele Patrick
I think that when we started the women’s Library, it was a a relatively hostile environment. You know, it was a time of Section 28 we were coming out of the white heat of Thatcherism and it must be said that we didn’t have a great fun in terms of intersexual politics and the Thatcher era. So it was a difficult era to actually forge a women’s library. Now I feel like we’re seeing with young people of every gender, a real understanding about what a place like this has to offer them so that people can find out about how to get involved in struggles that actually shift the dial in terms of progressive movements for change. So I would really hope as I’m sort of almost edging out of the Women’s Library over the next few decades that there will be this great energy that I’m sensing a great appetite to actually look at archives look at collections, look back to look forward. So I’m really excited about what people will do with the type of resources that are here and the type of energy that I can see across young people, older people as we move into the next undoubtedly challenging decades but fueled with a passion for the changemaking work that we’re doing.

Iagan MacNeil
Well, Adele has been an absolute pleasure to be in your company here at Glasgow Women’s Library. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your insights and hopefully we’ll all have a lovely International Women’s Day.

Dr Adele Patrick
Oh, well I’m all for that. And thank you so much for coming. It’s been a pleasure to give you a tour.

Iagan MacNeil
Thank you.