 Charles Law's Witteong gave notice to move at the next council meeting that it be recommended to the general meeting that ladies be eligible for membership. Mr Frampton would second this resolution. Wow. When I was approaching the archive, I knew that women were elected for the first time in 1922, but what I really wanted to know was the story of how the society got to that point. So I sat down and read the council minute books from the founding in 1905, and amazingly at the second ever meeting, the idea of women being members was brought up by Charles Law's Witteong, one of the founding members of the society. The archive at the Royal Society of Sculptors is totally uncatalogued, which means that you can't just type into a search engine and find what's written in the archive. So to find out anything, you have to just sit down and read through sometimes years and years of archives to find that one thing you're looking for. Remember when I first looked at this, everyone in the office was looking at it and I was like, is that an L? Is that a T? It must be an L, right? Uncatalogued archive is really irresistible because you never know what you might find. It's difficult, but also you can find some surprises in there because a lot of the early female members didn't have membership files in the archive so there were real gaps in the archive about these women and if there is an archival trace of these women, it's very difficult to study them and to know that they even existed. So this project really highlighted these women, their lives and their careers. For the modern society as well, it reminded, especially female members, it reminds them of how far female members have come and how difficult it was to be a female sculptor and recognised as a professional female sculptor in the early to mid 20th century. It introduced the question of admitting distinguished lady sculptors to honorary membership and a general discussion on the admission of ladies to both classes of membership ensued. The principle of admitting ladies to membership of the society was ultimately approved and ordered to stand part of the secretary scheme for widening the scope of the society. A lot of female sculptors and artists suffered from accusations of amateurism that they weren't serious professional artists and having the suffix after the name of ARBS, which is an associate member or FRBS, which is a fellow, really meant a lot to a lot of these women and that's something that comes up in the oral histories as well that that mark of the professional was really important to women. From women first being elected in 1922, now in 2021, the society is completely different. The membership is nearly 700 strong and has a pretty equal gender balance. The board of trustees also has a pretty much a 50-50 gender split. The director Caroline Worthington is female and even our patron, Queen Elizabeth II, is a woman.