July 6, 2016 • 40 mins
Almost as soon as public libraries began flourishing, librarian quickly became one of the most female-dominated jobs in the country. Cristen and Caroline break down was being a librarian was really like back in the day and the badass women who've shaped these community centers of learning and culture.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom never told you from house top
works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline, and welcome back to our conversation
about librarians. Yes, poor yourself, a liberry beverage, which you
(00:23):
won't get that joke if you missed our first episode.
But in case you're wondering, it is lime, BlackBerry and
gin and maybe a little bit of fizzy water. Totally
fizzy water ever I it's our new summer cocktail. So
in our last episode, we talked about the original librarians
in the original librarian stereotype, which was a white, fusty
(00:47):
curmudgeon Lee Fellow right picture Giles from Buffy, but not
as cool. Yeah, totally not as cool. Um, if Melville
Dewey had been Buffy's watcher, it would have gotten real creepy.
Would have been the worst. I'm putting that image out
of my brain immediately. He would have been like literally
like watching her all the time, just like hug and
(01:10):
her like, no, I'm friendly, I'm friendly. This isn't creepy.
Maybe that was such a rough fight. Let me just
stop tell anyone I did this. So in case you're
completely lost right now. Don't worry, It's all explained in
the previous episode, because Melville Dewey of the Dewey decimal
System is a big reason why librarianship became so quickly
(01:34):
feminized and remains feminized. Like we said in our last episode, today,
more than eight percent of all librarians are women. It's
mostly white women. Um. Women of color comprised less than
six of all librarians. And we're going to get into
diversity later on in the podcast, but in this episode,
(01:58):
we want to focus on what was happening with the
women as Dewey and his cohorts were standardizing this profession
in quotes and I say in quotes because there was
this whole debate and kind of remains a debate as
to whether or not librarianship is a profession. Yeah, like
(02:20):
a profession like a lawyer versus a service oriented job exactly. Yeah.
And and a lot of this information is coming from
this fabulous paper we read called the Tinder Technicians, not
Tinder the Tender, The Tender Technicians the feminization of public librarianship.
(02:40):
It's basically sminty in a paper. It's so fascinating and uh,
full of really incredible detail about gender dynamics and anxieties
about gender in librarianship. Yeah, there's so many intersections of gender, class,
raised sexual reality going on in the development of librarianship.
(03:03):
And now I will think of that every time. Ay
I smell that book smell love it, which is one
of my favorite smells. I wish that instead of the
new car smell, I could get a car that just
smells like a library gets that that old book, that
old book smell, and you just had a book in
your car at all times that you could rest your
face on. Am I the only one who likes to
(03:25):
snuggle a book? It's pages? Never mind? Anyway, Um, what
I was going to say is that we we move
after after the Civil War, we moved from the stereotypical
librarian being a curmudgeon lee, upper class white guy to
it being a spinster woman. And so what was going on. Basically,
(03:51):
libraries were opening very quickly, as we discussed in our
last episode. Uh, they needed workers and they need at
them cheaply, and as happens with so many fields and
industries in the world, in this country, Um, they looked
at women as a bargain. Yeah, women were absolutely a
(04:13):
bargain because there were very few job opportunities for women
at the time. And at the time we're talking about,
uh is the late eighteen seventies into the turn of
the century. So this is the period when the guys
at the top, Dewey at all, are really trying to
professionalize things. But um parallel to the development of the
(04:37):
public school system, they can't get teachers or librarians fast enough.
Because of industrialization and urbanization, men are being attracted to
different kinds of jobs and entrepreneurialism. So who's a bargain?
Women are a bargain. And by eighteen seventy eight two
(05:00):
words of library workers in terms of the clerks and
assistants were women. And it's no surprise because libraries tended
to have pretty small budgets. They had to be thrifty
with what they had from taxes and endowments. And in
an eighteen seventies six article titled how to make town
(05:22):
Libraries Successful, one of the tips was quote women should
be employed as librarians and assistants as far as possible,
essentially as far up the ranks as possible. Yeah, it's
crazy to me to read about women as objects. I mean,
(05:43):
I know I'm saying that as a co host of
Sminty and so I should be used to that. But like, literally,
women aren't discussed as, oh, they're a great investment because
they're hard workers, or they're so smart, or like they
go to a fabulous all women library school. It's it's
literally like, get the as women bodied people in here
because they are so cheap. Yeah, and you'll get a
(06:05):
lot of bang for your buck, whereas if you hire
a man cheaply. And this is according to this eighteen
seventies article, this is me just not just going off
the mouth. If you hire a man at the same rate,
you're not going to get as much work out of
him because these are as. The title of the paper says,
they have the tender technicians. Again not to be confused
(06:27):
with the tinder technicians, because that's another podcast. Um. And
this kind of work, like being a secretary, like being
a teacher, but even more so, was considered respectable and
very women appropriate because books equaled culture and thus it
(06:48):
was within women's separate sphere during this Victorian era, right because,
as we discussed in our last episode, we had moved
away from the masculine ideal being the elite, genteel, non
working man, the man who sat around with his bubble
pipe at home. Uh. Now we have the ideal masculinity
(07:08):
being the self made, hard working man. And so you
have a job where, yes you have to leave the house,
but it's now so much better suited to, uh complimenting
what masculinity was perceived to be at the time. So
you have women being the overseers of culture working in
(07:29):
quiet libraries, and it was perceived to be this great position,
even more so than teaching, because you didn't have to
breathe that bad air of those stifled classrooms. And again
not my words words of the time, Um, you didn't
have to be around dirty children all day, and you
didn't have to put in all of that hard mental
and physical work. Well, and as we talked about in
(07:52):
our episode for a while back on the feminization of teaching,
like ye old public schools or kind of intend sometimes
like because you would have these untrained women teachers coming
in with students of all ages sometimes who were larger
and taller than them, and it could be physically uh
(08:15):
exacting to manage a classroom because you have, of course,
like all different grades smushed together, but not so in
a library. And the way that libraries were even advertised
was as domestic spaces, because these were public facing roles
where people would come in and you would be, you know,
(08:39):
obviously like guiding them to the kinds of books and
and learning. There was the benevolent feminine mission of libraries. Um. So,
on the one hand, it's good that libraries were so
welcoming to women, be as it gave them job opportunities.
(09:02):
But on the other hand, because it's so neatly fit
into that Victorian womanhood ideal that it really handicapped them
from asserting equal status with men since they were essentially
conforming in this role. Yeah, and it's no surprise that
the first children's libraries and reading rooms that this country
(09:24):
saw were overseen by women. And you know, we read
stories too about women in the progressive era who ran
reading rooms in like tenement housing and settlement housing, who
really dedicated themselves to the moral and social uplift of
either the lower classes or immigrants or both. Um through reading.
(09:47):
There was one woman in I wish I could remember
her story, but there was one woman in Boston who
established the Saturday what was it called the Saturday Evening
Girls Club, and I mean it was it was as
cool as it sounds. I'm going to say that it
sounded cool to me. And it literally brought um, poorer
(10:09):
young women together of all different backgrounds, Jewish girls, Italian girls,
you know who might Irish girls who might not meet
at church or at school because they are so separated
by neighborhood. They were able to come together in these
library clubs that started popping up in Boston. And they
(10:29):
were I mean, they took dance lessons, they obviously focused
a lot on reading and literature and literacy um, and
it gave so many girls an opportunity to be out
of the house learning rather than holding down a job
at fourteen. Well, and that's the catch twenty two of
this whole thing, because yes, you have, like the the
(10:51):
restriction of all of the gender norms that were kind
of heaped upon this particular occupation. What like the importance
of their work like can't be emphasized enough. Well, and
it's also the fact that you know, we don't have
to tell you this fair listeners, but masculine is the
(11:14):
norm in our society. And so even with the important
roles that these librarians were playing. Because they were pursuing
a quote unquote more feminine way of doing things, it
was easier to dismiss Yeah. I mean, and they didn't
really have any power within the profession either, which leads
(11:34):
us to how some women were totally aware that the
system was rigged. Um. In we have Caroline Humans raising
the quote unquote woman question at a meeting of the
American Library Association, which means that she was essentially getting
up to a room mostly filled with men, saying, okay, um,
(12:00):
I'm a little concerned because women make between three d
and nine hundred dollars per year. That's not a lot
in case you were wondering, And she said, librarians, Um,
you know, we we aren't considered like that valuable. Yet
we write for six or seven hours a day. We
(12:20):
have to know multiple language and quote understand the relation
of all arts and sciences to each other, and must
have a minute acquaintance with geography, history, art, and literature.
And she said, in order to avoid just exhaustion and breakdown,
humans says, I mean, we we just have to make
sure we sleep and we eat well. And I also
(12:43):
recommend a two to three mile walk every day, which hey, listeners, Kristen,
if you can figure out how to do all of
this stuff in a day, let me know, because I
don't have I don't see how you can have all
of these things. Yeah, we do a lot. This is
more than that. And one thing that came to my
when I was reading Humans's account of having to understand
(13:04):
the interrelatedness of all those different subject matters knowing all
these languages is, uh, the comedy from the nineteen fifties
called Desk Set, which is on Netflix listeners, and it's
fantastic if you haven't seen it. It stars Katherine Hepburn
and she is the head of this team of reference
librarians and they were essentially human Googles because computers did
(13:27):
not exist. And these women are brilliant because essentially their
job is to answer telephones of you know, people in
the building needing to know answers to their questions and
like really esoteric kind of stuff, and these women would
just rattle it off immediately because they knew all of
(13:50):
these subject matters. They're brilliant. So going back to I
mean Humans and her cohorts were in a way like
human compute shoters. Yeah, and so you know, it sounds
like with humans's argument saying we're not paid enough and
yet we do all of this stuff, which is clearly
(14:11):
being I have to be brilliant, I have to work
really hard, I have to be on all the time.
I'm I'm doing all of this work. That sounds like
an argument for a professional field. It does not sound
like an argument for a service oriented occupation. And I'm
not in any way disparaging service industry work. But what
I'm saying is that librarianship is strange and that it
(14:33):
exists in that sort of weird twilight area, that gray
area between professionalism and well in in perception at least,
and in pay, between professionalism and service industry. And it's
understandable that if those overworked and underpaid women at that
(14:53):
time wanted to climb the very limited ranks, they would
m Maine unmarried. It was really only the spinsters who
could succeed. So by nineteen o five, the prudish withdrawn
lady librarian stereotype was firmly entrenched. It took no time
(15:14):
at all. Well, yeah, and I mean, keep in mind
this this arrow burrows that's happening right here, because women socially,
and a lot of times, according to the rules of
the company, granted retirement libraries. But once you got married,
you typically couldn't hold a job anymore. You were expected
to return to your home and cook for your husband
(15:36):
and whatever whatever, be a housewife, exactly like it was
with teaching, exactly. And so the women who remained in
the profession and wanted to stay dedicated, wanted to rise
through the ranks, didn't want to leave having a job
that they loved. Presumably, Well, of course, they were then
(15:56):
considered spinsters because they weren't married. And so it's just
like a cycle of well, wait, but society is creating
this trap, and then you're punishing women for it. You're
punishing women for being the undesirable, crotchety spinsters, when in reality,
if they had wanted to keep their job, they can't
get married. Yeah, and and hence we fast forward to
(16:16):
It's a Wonderful Life, And if George Bailey hadn't married Mary,
she would have become that spinster librarian. That's that was
her punishment. I remember watching that as a kid being like,
but I like librarians. Huh, she's so scary. Why she's
so scary. I'm gonna knit something. It's the tables returning conger.
(16:38):
You've never seen. It's a wonderful life. I've never seen.
It's a wonderful life. Okay, listeners, In case you're relatively
new to the podcast, my pop cultural knowledge spans from
about like nineteen forty to nineteen sixty almost just inhaled
my water. Um, you you've still got lot on me. Well, yeah,
(17:02):
my nineties which comedies or dramas whatever. But although I'm
finally watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I feel like I'm
I'm really reclaiming my youth, my lost youth. Good. So,
by the nineteen thirties, librarianship was female and second only
to public school teaching as the most feminized job in America. Yes, basically,
(17:27):
women could be teachers, librarians, or nurses or secretaries or
secretaries until they got married, in which case sometimes by law,
they had to quit their jobs. So womaning is great. Yeah,
but well, next up we're going to talk about some
amazing women who are like, Okay, I see you cultural confines,
and I will raise you my brain my library card.
(17:51):
So in our last episode, which we're not going to
rehash every reason why Dewey is super creepy. Melvill Dewey
the father of modern librarianship. But it despite the fact
that he was a creep uh, he did draw so
many women into the profession. He was the one who
really sparked the feminization of librarianship. And again, despite his
(18:15):
general shadiness, because he trained so many women and he
expected such brilliance and hard work and efficiency, robotic efficiency,
he did have some pretty brilliant women emerged from his teaching.
So we wanted to highlight three of them, starting with
(18:35):
Mary salome A Cutler, who became a head cataloger at
the Columbia Library in eighteen eighty nine. And that's a
pretty big deal considering how Columbia University was all men
at the time. Now, eight eighty nine was also the
year that Dewey resigned from Columbia University. Because they were like, Dooey,
(18:57):
we don't want all these women around. Cutler had to
leave her job, and she followed Dewey actually to his
newly established New York State Library School, and I want
to say that she was actually in his very first
class um and in she chaired the American Library Association's
(19:20):
committee to build the model library for the World's Columbian Exposition.
And it doesn't sound like a big deal, perhaps to
modern ears, but it was quite a big deal. It
was a big deal. The the exposition was where you
showed off new advancements and innovations and peered into what
might be in the future shelves of books look at it.
(19:44):
But it was a pretty controversial move because Dewey was like, dudes,
I want Cutler to had this committee. Uh, And they
were like, Dewey, but we hate girls. Look at the
sign it says no girls allowed. And it was like,
only like girls, I'm leaving this tree house. And then
the second woman we wanted to highlight is Mary Wright Plumber.
(20:06):
She helped establish the Pratt Institute's Free Library and pioneered
library children's rooms, among of course a lot of other
amazing stuff, and became the American Library Association president in
nine And even though she was one of Dewey's earliest students, Plumber,
as we talked about in the previous episode, when she
(20:28):
became a l A president, she was like, Okay, well,
now that I'm in a position of power, guess what
do do we I'm not gonna I'm not gonna meet
with you. Yeah, no, be out of here. Yeah, you
guys goes in any other episode if you haven't um.
And then we have to talk about Katherine Sharp, Katherine L. Sharp,
who was such a whiz. When do We was asked
(20:50):
for the best man to start a library program at
Chicago's Armor Institute, do We said that the best man
is a woman, which to me sounds like such a
romantic comedy line. Um, except that Dewey is super creepy
and I would not want to see a character based
on him in a rom com um. And Sharp actually
became director of the University of Illinois library program and
(21:12):
the university's library. And you know that doesn't sound like okay,
university librarian great, but no, like there were caste systems
in place almost for librarians, and university or academic libraries
were seen as such a big deal compared to your
smaller local libraries. Well in, the University of Illinois apparently
still has one of the most renowned library science programs
(21:36):
in the US. So oh, kathanel Sharp did a good
job because she was there their first director, and she
set up everything being a dual director of an academic
program and a library. Yeah. Well she did such a
good job that she actually retired in nineteen o seven
because quote, it was crushing the human element out of
(21:56):
her life. So she wrote that in her Reside Nation
letter Lord. So that's burnout. So then I recommend you
go listen to our episode with Emily Airies of bossed
up on Burnout. Well, I mean, but that just goes
to show what Caroline humans was talking about, Like, we
are doing so much and and kathanel Sharp surely didn't
(22:20):
have time for a two to three mile walk every day.
Who does? So there were these women who were so
dedicated to the job and really passionate about this work
and obviously um innovative, just as innovative as Dewey was.
And all of our librarian history that we've talked about,
(22:44):
even in the last episode and up till now, has
been exclusively about white folks, and even today the profession
is largely quite But you know who else was trailblazing
as all of this was going on, even though they
were very much shoved to the side. Or African Americans. Yeah,
(23:06):
that's right. There is such a rich history around African
American library culture in this country, but it tends to,
like so many things around, diversity in this country just
not be discussed as much. Yeah. So Philadelphia is home
to both the Reading Room Society, which was the first
(23:26):
social library for African Americans, which was established in eighty eight,
and the Female Literary Society, which was established in eighteen
thirty one, which was the first social library for black women.
So Philadelphia got it going on right, um, which just
Philadelphia just makes me want to start singing the Fresh
(23:48):
Prince song. Me too. I got to start it. I
held back. I did too. I did to conger. We're
I feel like we're growing up, although I really must
grown up from our fresh Prince, Fresh Prince days. Um.
But it wasn't until nineteen o four that in Henderson, Kentucky,
we get a one room annex opening at the rear
(24:08):
of the eighth Street Colored School to serve as a library.
This is the first structure built specifically to offer public
library services to African Americans, whereas the first white essentially
public library, tax supported library had been established all the
way back in eighteen thirty three. Um, and you would
(24:30):
have a little kind of blacks only library rooms popping
up here and there that would have been privately funded
or funded through churches, but this was the first one
supported by public tax dollars. And the thing is as
lofty as public libraries original goals were in terms of
(24:52):
enriching the entire community, what they really meant at the
time was the white community, because libraries were aggregated. Yeah,
and so what do you do when you're unwelcome in
essentially a public facility that says we don't want you
or won't serve you. You start your own organizations. And
so you have Molly Lee Houston, who established a library
(25:16):
for African Americans in Raleigh, North Carolina. And this would
have been happening around the same time as women's clubs
popping up in African American communities and progressive era ideals
of lifting as you climb and providing these kinds of services,
in particularly literacy for this community. That was, you know,
(25:38):
coming out of the grips of slavery. Um. So fast
forward to and we have the West Virginia Supreme Court
ruling that Charleston libraries cannot exclude black patrons since as taxpayers,
they're equally entitled to library service. But it wasn't until
(25:59):
nineteen fifty four Supreme Court ruling in Brown versus Board
of Education that across the country you have separate but
equal being outlawed in those public spaces like schools, but
also libraries. We never hear about civil rights and libraries.
I feel like, yeah, I know, people just think libraries
(26:19):
or nothing but super quiet spaces where nothing ever happens.
But so much happened, right, I mean, they became another
yet another site of civil rights sit ins for integration,
like integration in reality, not just the legal dismantling of segregation,
actually legitimately integrating libraries UM. In nineteen sixty three, for instance,
(26:42):
a white mob attacked two black men who were just
trying to get library cards in Anniston, Alabama. I read
that and I just wanted to throw my laptop out
the window because if like that crystallizes so much, like
the level of seated racist hatred that you would want
(27:04):
to attack someone for getting a library card, like, it's horrifying. UM. So,
not surprisingly these were sites of protests, but to its credit,
the American Library Association was on record as pro integration UM.
And I think it was actually in the fifties that
(27:25):
they held their first meeting in the South because initially
they had been kind of nervous about racial tensions in
the South. Um, but they amended their Library Bill of Rights,
which how cute is that? That's really sweet? Um, But
they amended the Library Bill of Rights in the early
sixties to codify its stands, saying like, you cannot exclude
(27:50):
people on the basis of race from entering these places
of public learning. Yeah, I mean not everyone was terrible.
You have during the civil rights era, twenty five freedom
libraries that were established in Mississippi by volunteer civil rights
advocating librarians talk about some superheroes, and anyone listening who
(28:12):
knows more about these freedom libraries please write to us
mom stuff at how stuffworks dot com because this was
we found this information on the American Library Association's website,
so to me, that means it's legit. But when I
started doing more research trying to find out more about
freedom libraries, because hello, how cool is that, I couldn't
(28:34):
find anything else because so much of our popular civil
rights history is focused on desegregating schools and things like that.
So if anyone knows anything, I want to know, because
I just want to be able to give those librarians
or druthers. Yeah. And what is so fabulous about this
(28:54):
is that when we talk about the history of African Americans,
when we talk about the history of black people in
this country, so much is lost. We don't have some
of the names, the amount of names that we do
from pioneering white people, even pioneering white women. But we
are so happy to be able to give you a
few names of some badass black librarians who led the way.
(29:19):
So in nineteen three you have bibliotherapy pioneer Sadie Peterson
Delaney who establishes the library in the Veterans Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama,
for recuperating black soldiers. And I have not heard the
term bibliotherapy before, Caroline, but it makes total sense. So
(29:40):
Delaney realized that there are therapeutic benefits to reading, and
she specifically sought out African American focused reading material at
the time, which was a bit of a task, um,
but she did it because she knew how Horton having
(30:01):
that inspirational literature would be for these soldiers who I mean,
they're coming back home, they're injured, but they're coming back
to a prejudice society even after they fought for their country. Yeah.
And another incredible woman carving out of space for African
American readers is Vivian G. Harsh, who in ninety two
(30:23):
with Chicago's first black librarian, and she established a world
renowned research collection of African American history and literature that
is still at the Chicago Library. It's still in existence,
and according to a biographical source on Vivian Harsh, this
library that she established became quote a mecca for literary
(30:47):
and cultural icons of the period, including Richard Wright, Lankston Hughes,
Zora Neil Hurston, and Gwendolen Brooks, some of whom even
contributed manuscripts to the institution. And Vivian G. Harsh is
someone who we could go back and do an entire
podcast on because she's one of the most important librarians
(31:08):
in American history, because she made it her mission to
essentially preserve African American culture and is considered one of
the reasons why the like Chicago Black Renaissance happened because
they were she essentially like set up this whole repository,
(31:28):
this like cultural center, saying look here, here, we are,
here is here all of the things that we've produced,
here's our history, all those things that otherwise would have
been marginalized or completely lost. And not too far away
from Vivian G. Harsh in Detroit, a little bit later,
you have Clara Stanton Jones, who became the first woman
(31:50):
and African American to serve as director of Detroit's Public Library,
despite white public protests. They're like, no, how, how how
gonna an African American woman be serving in this role?
But thankfully she was able to claim her post and
later went on to become the first African American president
(32:13):
of the American Library Association, and in night she was
appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the National Commission on
Libraries and Information Science, where she served until nineteen eighty two. So,
in other words, she was a big deal. Yeah, and
I love that. Um. When Miss magazine in two thousand
(32:36):
three was recognizing the contributions of incredible women to this country,
they looked to Carla Diane Hayden, who was the second
African American president of the a l A. And she
basically her reaction was basically like who me? And she
told the magazine when people ask what's unusual about me?
(32:57):
Being the a L as president. The first thing that
comes to mind is that I'm Africa an American, but
really what's more significant is that I'm a woman, because
even though it's a female dominated field, most library directors
are men. And thus these two episodes have come full
circle and the hierarchy is still in place. So we
(33:18):
have all of these amazing female librarians throughout the twentieth century,
who I mean, essentially or to thank for our public
learning and literacy in a lot of ways and community
building absolutely um and they don't get nearly as much
recognition as they should because I feel like the only
(33:39):
name that we associate with libraries is Malville, Dewey and um.
So I hope that this raises some awareness of just
what what amazing women and men librarians are. But like
the women who really built the libraries from the ground up, yeah,
and who who had so few positive expectations put on
(34:02):
them and exceeded them to the moon and back. So
now we want to hear from you. Do you have
beloved librarians in your life? Are you a librarian? We
want to know all of your library thoughts. Mom Stuff
at how stuff works dot com is our email address.
You can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or
messages on Facebook, and we've got a couple of messages
(34:25):
to share with you right now. Okay, well, I have
a letter here from Joshua in response to our Queer
Fashion episodes. Uh. Joshua says, greetings from Sitting Bowl College
on the Standing Rock Lakota Indian Reservation in fort Yates,
North Dakota. I'm from another plane's tribe, but I'm here
(34:46):
for an intensive summer program that trains teachers and how
to teach the Lakota and Dakota languages. First off, is
everyone in Atlanta as cool as you too. I've been
listening to the podcast for years, and I appreciate the
sensitivity with which you address a variety of topics. I
usually can't bring myself to listen to white, straight people
discuss any of the minority groups I'm part of, because
they almost invariably wind up saying horribly offensive things, even
(35:09):
when they mean well. But I'm always seriously impressed with
what a great job y'all do. Thanks so much for
keeping me company on my recent twenty five hours of
driving from California to North Dakota. One of your episodes
prompted me to write in the Queer Fashion episode, thanks
so much for covering this topic. I always wondered why
men's Western clothing was so much more boring than what
was Western women wear, and I found it fascinating to
(35:30):
learn that it was the result of a deliberate social
movement to tone things down. But also I feel like
it's worth noting that this boring men'swear phenomenon is not
universal in Native American cultures. I see men wearing regalia,
ceremonial clothing and every day where that is just as
colorful as what women wear. I'm a pow wow dancer,
and I also so pow wow regalia. There's definitely a
(35:52):
pretty strict gender binary in force, and I seriously cringe
when outsiders portray Native American cultures as some magic gender
fore utopia. But you'll see a lot of things that
would be stylistically off limits for Western men, long hair,
dangly earrings, sequence, shiny fabrics, and bright colors as standards
styles and attire in the pow wow arena. These styles
(36:13):
are sometimes misinterpreted by outsiders, but it's not uncommon for straight,
macho pow wow guys to wear pink regalia with sequins,
for example, and think nothing of it. Maybe something about
different gender standards and different cultures and what happens when
they clash and come together would be a good future topic.
Two of the younger boys in my pow wow family
have attached pink scarves on the belts of their pow
(36:34):
wow regalia to support a loved one who is a
breast cancer survivor, which I find very sweet. The bright
colors coming together in the individual and collective dancers regalia
are an inegal part of the pow wow, so I'm
glad we have defied this mainstream trend. So thank you
so much Joshua for writing in. Well, I've got a
letter here from Nicole about our episode on women in
(36:56):
political campaigning, and she writes, I love your podcast about
women in politics. It really summed up a lot of
my feelings about where women have been placed in campaigns
in my struggles with that. I started out wanting to
be a media consultant or campaign manager in politics, but
while interning for a media consulting firm, I was steered
toward fundraising by my all male bosses in the city
(37:19):
I worked in all of the fundraisers were women, and
my bosses told me that to be a fundraiser, you
must be well dressed, and then they ranked the fundraisers
on their level of bitchiness. This is one of the
hundreds of stories I could share about sexism in the
campaign office. Since then, I interned on a presidential political
finance team and now work full time at a political
(37:41):
fundraising firm where I worked for the governor of my state.
What what, Nicole impressive? As you mentioned, in politics, it's
important to have a mentor to advocate for you. This
is really the only way to get the best jobs.
Most campaigns never post a job ad, but instead asked
their friends if they have anyone to recommend. Also will
normally choose to mentor someone that they think is like them.
(38:04):
So it's a lot harder for women to be recommended
for the best jobs in other fields because they're so
concentrated in finance. Other factors that lead to women being
fundraisers is that they're the most abundant job, since candidates
always need more money. If a person doesn't know the
right people or have a mentor to get their resumes
passed around, than fundraising jobs are normally the only ones
(38:25):
posted on political jobs boards. In regard to why people
assume women are better suited for fundraising, something I've noticed
is that donors are nicer to women. We often spend
a lot of time calling people for money, and people
get irritated when they receive those calls. When you call
very cheerfully and sound as sweetly as possible, donors normally
(38:46):
won't yell at you. My boss is too badass. Women
always tell me to be as peppy as possible when
dealing with difficult clients. I have male coworkers and they
get yelled at more often than the women in my office.
I could go on and on about women in campaigns
and specifically fundraising. I hope my email makes sense. As
you mentioned, everyone in campaigns were crazy hours and I'm
(39:06):
very sleep deprived. Thanks for validating all of my feelings
about my industry, and for your other episodes get me
through hours of staring at Excel sheets. Well, Nicole, thank
you so much for your insight and more power to
you in in that field, because I can only imagine
that it is look toughie, So listeners now, I want
(39:28):
to hear from you mom stuff at how stuff works
dot com. Is our email address and for links to
all of our social media as well as all of
our blogs, videos, and podcasts with our sources so you
can learn so much more about librarians. Head on over
to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com for more
(39:48):
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff Works dot com
Welcome to stuff Mom never told you from house top
works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline, and welcome back to our conversation
about librarians. Yes, poor yourself, a liberry beverage, which you
(00:23):
won't get that joke if you missed our first episode.
But in case you're wondering, it is lime, BlackBerry and
gin and maybe a little bit of fizzy water. Totally
fizzy water ever I it's our new summer cocktail. So
in our last episode, we talked about the original librarians
in the original librarian stereotype, which was a white, fusty
(00:47):
curmudgeon Lee Fellow right picture Giles from Buffy, but not
as cool. Yeah, totally not as cool. Um, if Melville
Dewey had been Buffy's watcher, it would have gotten real creepy.
Would have been the worst. I'm putting that image out
of my brain immediately. He would have been like literally
like watching her all the time, just like hug and
(01:10):
her like, no, I'm friendly, I'm friendly. This isn't creepy.
Maybe that was such a rough fight. Let me just
stop tell anyone I did this. So in case you're
completely lost right now. Don't worry, It's all explained in
the previous episode, because Melville Dewey of the Dewey decimal
System is a big reason why librarianship became so quickly
(01:34):
feminized and remains feminized. Like we said in our last episode, today,
more than eight percent of all librarians are women. It's
mostly white women. Um. Women of color comprised less than
six of all librarians. And we're going to get into
diversity later on in the podcast, but in this episode,
(01:58):
we want to focus on what was happening with the
women as Dewey and his cohorts were standardizing this profession
in quotes and I say in quotes because there was
this whole debate and kind of remains a debate as
to whether or not librarianship is a profession. Yeah, like
(02:20):
a profession like a lawyer versus a service oriented job exactly. Yeah.
And and a lot of this information is coming from
this fabulous paper we read called the Tinder Technicians, not
Tinder the Tender, The Tender Technicians the feminization of public librarianship.
(02:40):
It's basically sminty in a paper. It's so fascinating and uh,
full of really incredible detail about gender dynamics and anxieties
about gender in librarianship. Yeah, there's so many intersections of gender, class,
raised sexual reality going on in the development of librarianship.
(03:03):
And now I will think of that every time. Ay
I smell that book smell love it, which is one
of my favorite smells. I wish that instead of the
new car smell, I could get a car that just
smells like a library gets that that old book, that
old book smell, and you just had a book in
your car at all times that you could rest your
face on. Am I the only one who likes to
(03:25):
snuggle a book? It's pages? Never mind? Anyway, Um, what
I was going to say is that we we move
after after the Civil War, we moved from the stereotypical
librarian being a curmudgeon lee, upper class white guy to
it being a spinster woman. And so what was going on. Basically,
(03:51):
libraries were opening very quickly, as we discussed in our
last episode. Uh, they needed workers and they need at
them cheaply, and as happens with so many fields and
industries in the world, in this country, Um, they looked
at women as a bargain. Yeah, women were absolutely a
(04:13):
bargain because there were very few job opportunities for women
at the time. And at the time we're talking about,
uh is the late eighteen seventies into the turn of
the century. So this is the period when the guys
at the top, Dewey at all, are really trying to
professionalize things. But um parallel to the development of the
(04:37):
public school system, they can't get teachers or librarians fast enough.
Because of industrialization and urbanization, men are being attracted to
different kinds of jobs and entrepreneurialism. So who's a bargain?
Women are a bargain. And by eighteen seventy eight two
(05:00):
words of library workers in terms of the clerks and
assistants were women. And it's no surprise because libraries tended
to have pretty small budgets. They had to be thrifty
with what they had from taxes and endowments. And in
an eighteen seventies six article titled how to make town
(05:22):
Libraries Successful, one of the tips was quote women should
be employed as librarians and assistants as far as possible,
essentially as far up the ranks as possible. Yeah, it's
crazy to me to read about women as objects. I mean,
(05:43):
I know I'm saying that as a co host of
Sminty and so I should be used to that. But like, literally,
women aren't discussed as, oh, they're a great investment because
they're hard workers, or they're so smart, or like they
go to a fabulous all women library school. It's it's
literally like, get the as women bodied people in here
because they are so cheap. Yeah, and you'll get a
(06:05):
lot of bang for your buck, whereas if you hire
a man cheaply. And this is according to this eighteen
seventies article, this is me just not just going off
the mouth. If you hire a man at the same rate,
you're not going to get as much work out of
him because these are as. The title of the paper says,
they have the tender technicians. Again not to be confused
(06:27):
with the tinder technicians, because that's another podcast. Um. And
this kind of work, like being a secretary, like being
a teacher, but even more so, was considered respectable and
very women appropriate because books equaled culture and thus it
(06:48):
was within women's separate sphere during this Victorian era, right because,
as we discussed in our last episode, we had moved
away from the masculine ideal being the elite, genteel, non
working man, the man who sat around with his bubble
pipe at home. Uh. Now we have the ideal masculinity
(07:08):
being the self made, hard working man. And so you
have a job where, yes you have to leave the house,
but it's now so much better suited to, uh complimenting
what masculinity was perceived to be at the time. So
you have women being the overseers of culture working in
(07:29):
quiet libraries, and it was perceived to be this great position,
even more so than teaching, because you didn't have to
breathe that bad air of those stifled classrooms. And again
not my words words of the time, Um, you didn't
have to be around dirty children all day, and you
didn't have to put in all of that hard mental
and physical work. Well, and as we talked about in
(07:52):
our episode for a while back on the feminization of teaching,
like ye old public schools or kind of intend sometimes
like because you would have these untrained women teachers coming
in with students of all ages sometimes who were larger
and taller than them, and it could be physically uh
(08:15):
exacting to manage a classroom because you have, of course,
like all different grades smushed together, but not so in
a library. And the way that libraries were even advertised
was as domestic spaces, because these were public facing roles
where people would come in and you would be, you know,
(08:39):
obviously like guiding them to the kinds of books and
and learning. There was the benevolent feminine mission of libraries. Um. So,
on the one hand, it's good that libraries were so
welcoming to women, be as it gave them job opportunities.
(09:02):
But on the other hand, because it's so neatly fit
into that Victorian womanhood ideal that it really handicapped them
from asserting equal status with men since they were essentially
conforming in this role. Yeah, and it's no surprise that
the first children's libraries and reading rooms that this country
(09:24):
saw were overseen by women. And you know, we read
stories too about women in the progressive era who ran
reading rooms in like tenement housing and settlement housing, who
really dedicated themselves to the moral and social uplift of
either the lower classes or immigrants or both. Um through reading.
(09:47):
There was one woman in I wish I could remember
her story, but there was one woman in Boston who
established the Saturday what was it called the Saturday Evening
Girls Club, and I mean it was it was as
cool as it sounds. I'm going to say that it
sounded cool to me. And it literally brought um, poorer
(10:09):
young women together of all different backgrounds, Jewish girls, Italian girls,
you know who might Irish girls who might not meet
at church or at school because they are so separated
by neighborhood. They were able to come together in these
library clubs that started popping up in Boston. And they
(10:29):
were I mean, they took dance lessons, they obviously focused
a lot on reading and literature and literacy um, and
it gave so many girls an opportunity to be out
of the house learning rather than holding down a job
at fourteen. Well, and that's the catch twenty two of
this whole thing, because yes, you have, like the the
(10:51):
restriction of all of the gender norms that were kind
of heaped upon this particular occupation. What like the importance
of their work like can't be emphasized enough. Well, and
it's also the fact that you know, we don't have
to tell you this fair listeners, but masculine is the
(11:14):
norm in our society. And so even with the important
roles that these librarians were playing. Because they were pursuing
a quote unquote more feminine way of doing things, it
was easier to dismiss Yeah. I mean, and they didn't
really have any power within the profession either, which leads
(11:34):
us to how some women were totally aware that the
system was rigged. Um. In we have Caroline Humans raising
the quote unquote woman question at a meeting of the
American Library Association, which means that she was essentially getting
up to a room mostly filled with men, saying, okay, um,
(12:00):
I'm a little concerned because women make between three d
and nine hundred dollars per year. That's not a lot
in case you were wondering, And she said, librarians, Um,
you know, we we aren't considered like that valuable. Yet
we write for six or seven hours a day. We
(12:20):
have to know multiple language and quote understand the relation
of all arts and sciences to each other, and must
have a minute acquaintance with geography, history, art, and literature.
And she said, in order to avoid just exhaustion and breakdown,
humans says, I mean, we we just have to make
sure we sleep and we eat well. And I also
(12:43):
recommend a two to three mile walk every day, which hey, listeners, Kristen,
if you can figure out how to do all of
this stuff in a day, let me know, because I
don't have I don't see how you can have all
of these things. Yeah, we do a lot. This is
more than that. And one thing that came to my
when I was reading Humans's account of having to understand
(13:04):
the interrelatedness of all those different subject matters knowing all
these languages is, uh, the comedy from the nineteen fifties
called Desk Set, which is on Netflix listeners, and it's
fantastic if you haven't seen it. It stars Katherine Hepburn
and she is the head of this team of reference
librarians and they were essentially human Googles because computers did
(13:27):
not exist. And these women are brilliant because essentially their
job is to answer telephones of you know, people in
the building needing to know answers to their questions and
like really esoteric kind of stuff, and these women would
just rattle it off immediately because they knew all of
(13:50):
these subject matters. They're brilliant. So going back to I
mean Humans and her cohorts were in a way like
human compute shoters. Yeah, and so you know, it sounds
like with humans's argument saying we're not paid enough and
yet we do all of this stuff, which is clearly
(14:11):
being I have to be brilliant, I have to work
really hard, I have to be on all the time.
I'm I'm doing all of this work. That sounds like
an argument for a professional field. It does not sound
like an argument for a service oriented occupation. And I'm
not in any way disparaging service industry work. But what
I'm saying is that librarianship is strange and that it
(14:33):
exists in that sort of weird twilight area, that gray
area between professionalism and well in in perception at least,
and in pay, between professionalism and service industry. And it's
understandable that if those overworked and underpaid women at that
(14:53):
time wanted to climb the very limited ranks, they would
m Maine unmarried. It was really only the spinsters who
could succeed. So by nineteen o five, the prudish withdrawn
lady librarian stereotype was firmly entrenched. It took no time
(15:14):
at all. Well, yeah, and I mean, keep in mind
this this arrow burrows that's happening right here, because women socially,
and a lot of times, according to the rules of
the company, granted retirement libraries. But once you got married,
you typically couldn't hold a job anymore. You were expected
to return to your home and cook for your husband
(15:36):
and whatever whatever, be a housewife, exactly like it was
with teaching, exactly. And so the women who remained in
the profession and wanted to stay dedicated, wanted to rise
through the ranks, didn't want to leave having a job
that they loved. Presumably, Well, of course, they were then
(15:56):
considered spinsters because they weren't married. And so it's just
like a cycle of well, wait, but society is creating
this trap, and then you're punishing women for it. You're
punishing women for being the undesirable, crotchety spinsters, when in reality,
if they had wanted to keep their job, they can't
get married. Yeah, and and hence we fast forward to
(16:16):
It's a Wonderful Life, And if George Bailey hadn't married Mary,
she would have become that spinster librarian. That's that was
her punishment. I remember watching that as a kid being like,
but I like librarians. Huh, she's so scary. Why she's
so scary. I'm gonna knit something. It's the tables returning conger.
(16:38):
You've never seen. It's a wonderful life. I've never seen.
It's a wonderful life. Okay, listeners, In case you're relatively
new to the podcast, my pop cultural knowledge spans from
about like nineteen forty to nineteen sixty almost just inhaled
my water. Um, you you've still got lot on me. Well, yeah,
(17:02):
my nineties which comedies or dramas whatever. But although I'm
finally watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I feel like I'm
I'm really reclaiming my youth, my lost youth. Good. So,
by the nineteen thirties, librarianship was female and second only
to public school teaching as the most feminized job in America. Yes, basically,
(17:27):
women could be teachers, librarians, or nurses or secretaries or
secretaries until they got married, in which case sometimes by law,
they had to quit their jobs. So womaning is great. Yeah,
but well, next up we're going to talk about some
amazing women who are like, Okay, I see you cultural confines,
and I will raise you my brain my library card.
(17:51):
So in our last episode, which we're not going to
rehash every reason why Dewey is super creepy. Melvill Dewey
the father of modern librarianship. But it despite the fact
that he was a creep uh, he did draw so
many women into the profession. He was the one who
really sparked the feminization of librarianship. And again, despite his
(18:15):
general shadiness, because he trained so many women and he
expected such brilliance and hard work and efficiency, robotic efficiency,
he did have some pretty brilliant women emerged from his teaching.
So we wanted to highlight three of them, starting with
(18:35):
Mary salome A Cutler, who became a head cataloger at
the Columbia Library in eighteen eighty nine. And that's a
pretty big deal considering how Columbia University was all men
at the time. Now, eight eighty nine was also the
year that Dewey resigned from Columbia University. Because they were like, Dooey,
(18:57):
we don't want all these women around. Cutler had to
leave her job, and she followed Dewey actually to his
newly established New York State Library School, and I want
to say that she was actually in his very first
class um and in she chaired the American Library Association's
(19:20):
committee to build the model library for the World's Columbian Exposition.
And it doesn't sound like a big deal, perhaps to
modern ears, but it was quite a big deal. It
was a big deal. The the exposition was where you
showed off new advancements and innovations and peered into what
might be in the future shelves of books look at it.
(19:44):
But it was a pretty controversial move because Dewey was like, dudes,
I want Cutler to had this committee. Uh, And they
were like, Dewey, but we hate girls. Look at the
sign it says no girls allowed. And it was like,
only like girls, I'm leaving this tree house. And then
the second woman we wanted to highlight is Mary Wright Plumber.
(20:06):
She helped establish the Pratt Institute's Free Library and pioneered
library children's rooms, among of course a lot of other
amazing stuff, and became the American Library Association president in
nine And even though she was one of Dewey's earliest students, Plumber,
as we talked about in the previous episode, when she
(20:28):
became a l A president, she was like, Okay, well,
now that I'm in a position of power, guess what
do do we I'm not gonna I'm not gonna meet
with you. Yeah, no, be out of here. Yeah, you
guys goes in any other episode if you haven't um.
And then we have to talk about Katherine Sharp, Katherine L. Sharp,
who was such a whiz. When do We was asked
(20:50):
for the best man to start a library program at
Chicago's Armor Institute, do We said that the best man
is a woman, which to me sounds like such a
romantic comedy line. Um, except that Dewey is super creepy
and I would not want to see a character based
on him in a rom com um. And Sharp actually
became director of the University of Illinois library program and
(21:12):
the university's library. And you know that doesn't sound like okay,
university librarian great, but no, like there were caste systems
in place almost for librarians, and university or academic libraries
were seen as such a big deal compared to your
smaller local libraries. Well in, the University of Illinois apparently
still has one of the most renowned library science programs
(21:36):
in the US. So oh, kathanel Sharp did a good
job because she was there their first director, and she
set up everything being a dual director of an academic
program and a library. Yeah. Well she did such a
good job that she actually retired in nineteen o seven
because quote, it was crushing the human element out of
(21:56):
her life. So she wrote that in her Reside Nation
letter Lord. So that's burnout. So then I recommend you
go listen to our episode with Emily Airies of bossed
up on Burnout. Well, I mean, but that just goes
to show what Caroline humans was talking about, Like, we
are doing so much and and kathanel Sharp surely didn't
(22:20):
have time for a two to three mile walk every day.
Who does? So there were these women who were so
dedicated to the job and really passionate about this work
and obviously um innovative, just as innovative as Dewey was.
And all of our librarian history that we've talked about,
(22:44):
even in the last episode and up till now, has
been exclusively about white folks, and even today the profession
is largely quite But you know who else was trailblazing
as all of this was going on, even though they
were very much shoved to the side. Or African Americans. Yeah,
(23:06):
that's right. There is such a rich history around African
American library culture in this country, but it tends to,
like so many things around, diversity in this country just
not be discussed as much. Yeah. So Philadelphia is home
to both the Reading Room Society, which was the first
(23:26):
social library for African Americans, which was established in eighty eight,
and the Female Literary Society, which was established in eighteen
thirty one, which was the first social library for black women.
So Philadelphia got it going on right, um, which just
Philadelphia just makes me want to start singing the Fresh
(23:48):
Prince song. Me too. I got to start it. I
held back. I did too. I did to conger. We're
I feel like we're growing up, although I really must
grown up from our fresh Prince, Fresh Prince days. Um.
But it wasn't until nineteen o four that in Henderson, Kentucky,
we get a one room annex opening at the rear
(24:08):
of the eighth Street Colored School to serve as a library.
This is the first structure built specifically to offer public
library services to African Americans, whereas the first white essentially
public library, tax supported library had been established all the
way back in eighteen thirty three. Um, and you would
(24:30):
have a little kind of blacks only library rooms popping
up here and there that would have been privately funded
or funded through churches, but this was the first one
supported by public tax dollars. And the thing is as
lofty as public libraries original goals were in terms of
(24:52):
enriching the entire community, what they really meant at the
time was the white community, because libraries were aggregated. Yeah,
and so what do you do when you're unwelcome in
essentially a public facility that says we don't want you
or won't serve you. You start your own organizations. And
so you have Molly Lee Houston, who established a library
(25:16):
for African Americans in Raleigh, North Carolina. And this would
have been happening around the same time as women's clubs
popping up in African American communities and progressive era ideals
of lifting as you climb and providing these kinds of services,
in particularly literacy for this community. That was, you know,
(25:38):
coming out of the grips of slavery. Um. So fast
forward to and we have the West Virginia Supreme Court
ruling that Charleston libraries cannot exclude black patrons since as taxpayers,
they're equally entitled to library service. But it wasn't until
(25:59):
nineteen fifty four Supreme Court ruling in Brown versus Board
of Education that across the country you have separate but
equal being outlawed in those public spaces like schools, but
also libraries. We never hear about civil rights and libraries.
I feel like, yeah, I know, people just think libraries
(26:19):
or nothing but super quiet spaces where nothing ever happens.
But so much happened, right, I mean, they became another
yet another site of civil rights sit ins for integration,
like integration in reality, not just the legal dismantling of segregation,
actually legitimately integrating libraries UM. In nineteen sixty three, for instance,
(26:42):
a white mob attacked two black men who were just
trying to get library cards in Anniston, Alabama. I read
that and I just wanted to throw my laptop out
the window because if like that crystallizes so much, like
the level of seated racist hatred that you would want
(27:04):
to attack someone for getting a library card, like, it's horrifying. UM. So,
not surprisingly these were sites of protests, but to its credit,
the American Library Association was on record as pro integration UM.
And I think it was actually in the fifties that
(27:25):
they held their first meeting in the South because initially
they had been kind of nervous about racial tensions in
the South. Um, but they amended their Library Bill of Rights,
which how cute is that? That's really sweet? Um, But
they amended the Library Bill of Rights in the early
sixties to codify its stands, saying like, you cannot exclude
(27:50):
people on the basis of race from entering these places
of public learning. Yeah, I mean not everyone was terrible.
You have during the civil rights era, twenty five freedom
libraries that were established in Mississippi by volunteer civil rights
advocating librarians talk about some superheroes, and anyone listening who
(28:12):
knows more about these freedom libraries please write to us
mom stuff at how stuffworks dot com because this was
we found this information on the American Library Association's website,
so to me, that means it's legit. But when I
started doing more research trying to find out more about
freedom libraries, because hello, how cool is that, I couldn't
(28:34):
find anything else because so much of our popular civil
rights history is focused on desegregating schools and things like that.
So if anyone knows anything, I want to know, because
I just want to be able to give those librarians
or druthers. Yeah. And what is so fabulous about this
(28:54):
is that when we talk about the history of African Americans,
when we talk about the history of black people in
this country, so much is lost. We don't have some
of the names, the amount of names that we do
from pioneering white people, even pioneering white women. But we
are so happy to be able to give you a
few names of some badass black librarians who led the way.
(29:19):
So in nineteen three you have bibliotherapy pioneer Sadie Peterson
Delaney who establishes the library in the Veterans Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama,
for recuperating black soldiers. And I have not heard the
term bibliotherapy before, Caroline, but it makes total sense. So
(29:40):
Delaney realized that there are therapeutic benefits to reading, and
she specifically sought out African American focused reading material at
the time, which was a bit of a task, um,
but she did it because she knew how Horton having
(30:01):
that inspirational literature would be for these soldiers who I mean,
they're coming back home, they're injured, but they're coming back
to a prejudice society even after they fought for their country. Yeah.
And another incredible woman carving out of space for African
American readers is Vivian G. Harsh, who in ninety two
(30:23):
with Chicago's first black librarian, and she established a world
renowned research collection of African American history and literature that
is still at the Chicago Library. It's still in existence,
and according to a biographical source on Vivian Harsh, this
library that she established became quote a mecca for literary
(30:47):
and cultural icons of the period, including Richard Wright, Lankston Hughes,
Zora Neil Hurston, and Gwendolen Brooks, some of whom even
contributed manuscripts to the institution. And Vivian G. Harsh is
someone who we could go back and do an entire
podcast on because she's one of the most important librarians
(31:08):
in American history, because she made it her mission to
essentially preserve African American culture and is considered one of
the reasons why the like Chicago Black Renaissance happened because
they were she essentially like set up this whole repository,
(31:28):
this like cultural center, saying look here, here, we are,
here is here all of the things that we've produced,
here's our history, all those things that otherwise would have
been marginalized or completely lost. And not too far away
from Vivian G. Harsh in Detroit, a little bit later,
you have Clara Stanton Jones, who became the first woman
(31:50):
and African American to serve as director of Detroit's Public Library,
despite white public protests. They're like, no, how, how how
gonna an African American woman be serving in this role?
But thankfully she was able to claim her post and
later went on to become the first African American president
(32:13):
of the American Library Association, and in night she was
appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the National Commission on
Libraries and Information Science, where she served until nineteen eighty two. So,
in other words, she was a big deal. Yeah, and
I love that. Um. When Miss magazine in two thousand
(32:36):
three was recognizing the contributions of incredible women to this country,
they looked to Carla Diane Hayden, who was the second
African American president of the a l A. And she
basically her reaction was basically like who me? And she
told the magazine when people ask what's unusual about me?
(32:57):
Being the a L as president. The first thing that
comes to mind is that I'm Africa an American, but
really what's more significant is that I'm a woman, because
even though it's a female dominated field, most library directors
are men. And thus these two episodes have come full
circle and the hierarchy is still in place. So we
(33:18):
have all of these amazing female librarians throughout the twentieth century,
who I mean, essentially or to thank for our public
learning and literacy in a lot of ways and community
building absolutely um and they don't get nearly as much
recognition as they should because I feel like the only
(33:39):
name that we associate with libraries is Malville, Dewey and um.
So I hope that this raises some awareness of just
what what amazing women and men librarians are. But like
the women who really built the libraries from the ground up, yeah,
and who who had so few positive expectations put on
(34:02):
them and exceeded them to the moon and back. So
now we want to hear from you. Do you have
beloved librarians in your life? Are you a librarian? We
want to know all of your library thoughts. Mom Stuff
at how stuff works dot com is our email address.
You can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or
messages on Facebook, and we've got a couple of messages
(34:25):
to share with you right now. Okay, well, I have
a letter here from Joshua in response to our Queer
Fashion episodes. Uh. Joshua says, greetings from Sitting Bowl College
on the Standing Rock Lakota Indian Reservation in fort Yates,
North Dakota. I'm from another plane's tribe, but I'm here
(34:46):
for an intensive summer program that trains teachers and how
to teach the Lakota and Dakota languages. First off, is
everyone in Atlanta as cool as you too. I've been
listening to the podcast for years, and I appreciate the
sensitivity with which you address a variety of topics. I
usually can't bring myself to listen to white, straight people
discuss any of the minority groups I'm part of, because
they almost invariably wind up saying horribly offensive things, even
(35:09):
when they mean well. But I'm always seriously impressed with
what a great job y'all do. Thanks so much for
keeping me company on my recent twenty five hours of
driving from California to North Dakota. One of your episodes
prompted me to write in the Queer Fashion episode, thanks
so much for covering this topic. I always wondered why
men's Western clothing was so much more boring than what
was Western women wear, and I found it fascinating to
(35:30):
learn that it was the result of a deliberate social
movement to tone things down. But also I feel like
it's worth noting that this boring men'swear phenomenon is not
universal in Native American cultures. I see men wearing regalia,
ceremonial clothing and every day where that is just as
colorful as what women wear. I'm a pow wow dancer,
and I also so pow wow regalia. There's definitely a
(35:52):
pretty strict gender binary in force, and I seriously cringe
when outsiders portray Native American cultures as some magic gender
fore utopia. But you'll see a lot of things that
would be stylistically off limits for Western men, long hair,
dangly earrings, sequence, shiny fabrics, and bright colors as standards
styles and attire in the pow wow arena. These styles
(36:13):
are sometimes misinterpreted by outsiders, but it's not uncommon for straight,
macho pow wow guys to wear pink regalia with sequins,
for example, and think nothing of it. Maybe something about
different gender standards and different cultures and what happens when
they clash and come together would be a good future topic.
Two of the younger boys in my pow wow family
have attached pink scarves on the belts of their pow
(36:34):
wow regalia to support a loved one who is a
breast cancer survivor, which I find very sweet. The bright
colors coming together in the individual and collective dancers regalia
are an inegal part of the pow wow, so I'm
glad we have defied this mainstream trend. So thank you
so much Joshua for writing in. Well, I've got a
letter here from Nicole about our episode on women in
(36:56):
political campaigning, and she writes, I love your podcast about
women in politics. It really summed up a lot of
my feelings about where women have been placed in campaigns
in my struggles with that. I started out wanting to
be a media consultant or campaign manager in politics, but
while interning for a media consulting firm, I was steered
toward fundraising by my all male bosses in the city
(37:19):
I worked in all of the fundraisers were women, and
my bosses told me that to be a fundraiser, you
must be well dressed, and then they ranked the fundraisers
on their level of bitchiness. This is one of the
hundreds of stories I could share about sexism in the
campaign office. Since then, I interned on a presidential political
finance team and now work full time at a political
(37:41):
fundraising firm where I worked for the governor of my state.
What what, Nicole impressive? As you mentioned, in politics, it's
important to have a mentor to advocate for you. This
is really the only way to get the best jobs.
Most campaigns never post a job ad, but instead asked
their friends if they have anyone to recommend. Also will
normally choose to mentor someone that they think is like them.
(38:04):
So it's a lot harder for women to be recommended
for the best jobs in other fields because they're so
concentrated in finance. Other factors that lead to women being
fundraisers is that they're the most abundant job, since candidates
always need more money. If a person doesn't know the
right people or have a mentor to get their resumes
passed around, than fundraising jobs are normally the only ones
(38:25):
posted on political jobs boards. In regard to why people
assume women are better suited for fundraising, something I've noticed
is that donors are nicer to women. We often spend
a lot of time calling people for money, and people
get irritated when they receive those calls. When you call
very cheerfully and sound as sweetly as possible, donors normally
(38:46):
won't yell at you. My boss is too badass. Women
always tell me to be as peppy as possible when
dealing with difficult clients. I have male coworkers and they
get yelled at more often than the women in my office.
I could go on and on about women in campaigns
and specifically fundraising. I hope my email makes sense. As
you mentioned, everyone in campaigns were crazy hours and I'm
(39:06):
very sleep deprived. Thanks for validating all of my feelings
about my industry, and for your other episodes get me
through hours of staring at Excel sheets. Well, Nicole, thank
you so much for your insight and more power to
you in in that field, because I can only imagine
that it is look toughie, So listeners now, I want
(39:28):
to hear from you mom stuff at how stuff works
dot com. Is our email address and for links to
all of our social media as well as all of
our blogs, videos, and podcasts with our sources so you
can learn so much more about librarians. Head on over
to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com for more
(39:48):
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff Works dot com
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