Apostles of Culture

Part one of Apostles of Culture put the social situation of the “new gentry elite” library founders into a nice historical context before giving some statistics about 19th century librarians and then specific examples of the careers of some notable men. In was interesting that these librarians were overwhelmingly upper-middle class and were, as Garrison calls them, vocationally unstable which shows that although they were from an elite class they seemed to face a fair amount of struggle in finding their place in society. They way that these early librarians sort of ended up in field makes me want to question their expertise and understanding of librarianship and highlights the “experimental” side of the American public library. What should the library’s purpose be? How should we achieve this purpose? These obably looked up to the elite members of society and once he had achieved a similar level of prominence he may have felt especially deserving of the authority it gave him.

Poole had to educate himself in the manners of the elite and in that way he parallels Windsor’s appreciation of self education. At the end of his career as a librarian Poole worked at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The Newberry library, we are told, was a public library but its staff thought of it as primarily a place for “gentlemen” assuming that the general public wouldn’t be able to appreciate the quality of the library’s collection. It is hard to believe that Poole could have worked in such an environment without having picked up some beliefs about the superiority of the intellectual in the library.

I found part two of the book “Moral Passage: the Fiction Problem” interesting but maybe not that important in the overall history of the library. I was probably worth considering that one of the issues that people had with light fiction was that is was read by impressionable women and at the same time women were the ones working in libraries, being expected to use their inherent superior morality and taste to guide the unlearned public. This double standard is revealed in another light when one considers that the novel has been considered historically as a feminine literary form and thus writing fiction was a fairly socially acceptable activity for a woman. I can just imagine the horror that some might have felt at the thought of a library full of women patrons and workers sitting around and reading books by women authors that might seem like trite romance novels to contemporary readers. At the same time the class distinction between the librarian and the house wife may have been significant enough to prevent either from recognizing the irony of the situation.

By far my favorite part of the book was “The Tender Technician.” I can see how this part could be controversial because in places I get a sense that Garrison is kind of blaming the victim in that women are complicit in a kind of cycle that traps them in pink collar library work. Men like Dewey advocated women in librarianship for often conflicting reasons. Women were suited to be librarians because they were becoming educated but at the same time women were perfect because librarians needn’t be skilled or formally educated. The library was a place for moral nurturing so women fit in well because they were suited to the domestic sphere but they were also expected to be serious intellectuals. I think this conflict not only reveals the double standards that women faced but tensions within the profession at large. Garrison seems to argue that women in the field cause feminization and that cause a lack of professionalization but to me it seems that the factors that led to feminization and professionalization existed side by side.