In Part I of "Apostles of Culture," Garrison portrays the American public library in the late 1800s as attempting to be an arbiter of culture, one of the last bastions of the gentry elite. She also offers a sort-of Marxist critique of the library as a social agent or "safety valve" for the unwashed masses. Librarians and library leaders are characterized as misfits in the new Industrial Age; they were at odds with both the growing socio-economic elite and with the proletariat. Garrison profiles the librarians who formed the model of the American public library as out-of-touch with the patrons they aimed to serve. How and why did this disconnect lead to the marginalization of the library and its failure to become a grand social and academic institution in the U.S.?
In chapter two, Garrison draws many conclusions and generalization from the profile of thirty-six library leaders in 1885 (I found this small sample size to be a bit problematic). Here and throughout the text, Garrison's second wave feminist critique (I know, she was writing it in the 1970s) could stand the infusion of some third wave feminism and queer theory. Of those thirty-six library leaders, there were eight women, five of whom never married and two of whom married late in life. Garrison takes their "spinster" status at face value: "One can safely assume that they chose an active life of work because their intellectual power and advanced education alienated them from the traditional feminine role of domesticity" (21). However, I would like to read into the margins--is it possible that these women were lesbians? Is it possible that library work afforded them some escape from the a patriarchal and heterosexual-dominated culture? And who are the other educated, single women who clamored to become librarians from 1876 to 1920?
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3 comments:
I don't know if one can assume that because 5 of the 8 women chose not to marry for whatever reason we can speculate their sexual preference-that seems rather besides the point to me. I am inclined to speculate that these women became librarians because they didn't want to marry (or were not considered eligible for whatever reason) and thus needed to support themselves financially. However, I do not have evidence to support this theory like there is no evidence to support they were lesbians and like Garrison lacks evidence to suggest these women did not marry because they were alienated from society and traditional female roles.
I reckon some of those librarians had to be lesbians.
In a footnote in Part 4 she does mention that in (then) contemporary times there seemed to be more gay men than you might expect in the library field and offers a couple of possible explanations for that, but Garrison seems to totally ignore the possibility of lesbian librarians.
I should have included this in my original post--a quotation from chapter 2--"it is unlikely that these women were driven to outside work because of financial need" (20). That's what tipped me off and made me speculate that there was more going on than the women's desire to lead an intellectual life.
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