Ottawa Women's Bookstore

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The Ottawa Women's Bookstore is opened in 1982 by Peggy Harris and Lee Fleming at 380 Elgin Street at Gladstone, three years after a horrible fire destroyed the building which housed the GO Centre for a time.

The store becomes a welcomed meeting place and source of information and reading materials for the lesbian and feminist community, one of the few spaces around aside from the Coral Reef and the Ottawa Women's Centre, which closed in 1980.

In January 1991, the bookstore moves to 272 Elgin but it doesn't remain long there. Evelyn Huer, Laura Rayner and Julie Gagnon, who all worked at the OWB, opens mother tongue books in 1992 after it closed, at 1067 Bank Street. When mother tongue closed in 2012, if left a void for women's and feminist literature and studies.

If you know more details about this place, please email info@bankstreet.ca to share dates, facts, images or more.