Vera Ruth Gordon Douie (1894–1979) was a Scottish librarian. She is known as the first librarian at The Women's Service library. She was an active member of the women's rights movement and her work was recognised with an OBE in 1967.
Throughout Douie's life, she was an active force of the women’s movement, specifically maintaining involvement in the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene. During World War II, Douie was a campaigner for equal rights, and she wrote books about women's employment.
Background
Her parents were Sir James McCrone Douie, a British civil servant in India, and Frances Mary Elizabeth Roe, daughter of Charles Arthur Roe; they had ten children. Her parents later moved back to the United Kingdom: her father's address c.1920 was 2 Chadlington Road, Oxford.
Vera's mother was a botanist and botanical artist, a friend of George Claridge Druce and contributor to the Flora of Oxfordshire (1927). Her address in 1938 was 12 Charlbury Road, Oxford. Mavis Batey moved into that house in the 1960s; her biographer Jean Stone described the daughters of the family as having scholarly interests and being "emancipated, well-educated North Oxford women." Mary Buchan Douie of the London School of Medicine for Women was her aunt, one of the first eight female graduates from Edinburgh University in 1893.
Vera Douie was born in Lahore, British India, in 1894. Her education began in Salisbury, England, at the Godolphin School. She continued her studies at the University of Oxford, at the Society of Oxford Home-Students, in 1912, at a period when women were not awarded degrees. She eventually took a degree there, in 1926.
Librarian
Leaving Oxford, Douie chose to live and work in London, rather than be supported by her family in India. From 1916 to 1921, she worked at the War Office library, as a library assistant. In 1921 she became the indexer of The Medical History of the War.
When the Women's Service House was opened by the London and National Society for Women's Service (LNSWS), Douie was brought in as librarian. It had been the Fleece Inn, a Georgian public house located at 35-37 Marsham Street, Westminster. A donation to Millicent Fawcett meant the LNSWS, previously known under other names and in rented accommodation, was able to establish a permanent headquarters. The House also provided accommodation for the Women's Service Library, founded at the same time in 1926. On 1 January 1926, Douie began there as its first librarian, and remained in the role for 41 years. She retired in 1967.
During her time as librarian, Douie transformed what had been a small library. The collection had been founded in 1909 by Ruth Cavendish Bentinck as a subscription library of feminist materials. Added to that was the Edward Wright collection, presented by Lady Wright (née Jane Georgina Wilson), wife of Sir Almroth Edward Wright who was anti-suffragist, named in honour of their son Edward who died in 1913 in a gun accident while he was a student at Trinity College, Dublin. On the splitting of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, the Cavendish Bentinck collection passed temporarily to the Townswomen's Guild; but Cavendish Bentinck made a new trust deed, giving it in 1931 to the LNSWS, so it remained with the Women’s Service Library.
Through her involvement with the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, Douie secured the accession of the large Josephine Butler collection. She also acquired the collection of Myra Sadd Brown, a suffragette and internationalist, with material on British colonies, South Asia and Africa. When Virginia Woolf was writing Three Guineas in the later 1930s, Douie and the library were major sources for facts and figures. Woolf donated books, and from 1938 funded purchases of books wanted by the library.
The House was bombed in 1940, and proved unusable after WWII ended. Douie worked on the library's conversion into the Fawcett Library of the Fawcett Society. It later became The Women's Library. The library passed to the British Library of Political and Economic Science of the London School of Economics in 2013.
After leaving the Fawcett Library, Douie was brought in during the 1970s to help curate the Sybil Campbell collection at what is now Crosby Moran Hall; now in part at the Martial Rose Library of the University of Winchester.