A Gendered Legacy: Librarianship
and the Social Value of Women’s Work
Christina Neigel

Librarianship’s struggles with compensation and social recognition are frequently centred around a concept of professionalization that expresses librarians’ enduring defence of their legitimacy as professionals.1 There is a
long-standing tendency in LIS literature to miss a close examination of the
broader social conditions and relations that have impacted the profession’s
evolution. Specifically, the diminished value of service and caring work,
core to modern librarianship, reflects broader problematic views about the
work that women perform. Librarians see a downward trend in full-time
employment, experience dissatisfaction with the kind of recognition they
receive in their work, and see continuing wage disparities between men
and women.2 Further, the historical roots of the profession, as a field hospitable to white, middle class women, greatly informs its present-day tensions

1 Mattea Garcia and Joshua Barbour, “‘Ask a Professional—Ask a Librarian’: Librarianship
and the Chronic Struggle for Professional Status,” Management Communication Quarterly
32, no. 4 (November 2018): 565–92, doi:10.1177/0893318918776798.
2 Laura Girmscheid and Meredith Schwartz, “Payday: Library Survey 2014,” Library
Journal, July 3, 2014, https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=payday-lj-salarysurvey-2014; Canadian Association of University Teachers,” Librarians in Canada’s
Universities & Colleges State of the Profession 2000–2014,” CAUT Education Review,
May 2017, https://www.caut.ca/sites/default/files/caut-education-review-2017-05_0.pdf;
Mary Jo Lynch, “Library Directors: Gender and Salary,” American Library Association,
March 29, 2007, http://www.ala.org/research/librarystaffstats/diversity/libdirectors.

Deconstructing Service in Libraries
Veronica Arellano Douglas and Joanna Gadsby

in creating a more socially and ethnically diverse workforce. Librarianship
often turns inward, blaming itself and its constituents for its woes rather
than turning its gaze towards the social structures that organize work. For
example, library literature often tasks librarians with educating their external funding and management bodies, encouraging them to raise awareness and public profiles with public officials “about the nature of librarians’
work and the ways they meet community needs using specialized skills and
knowledge.”3 Such advice ignores the ways librarianship is devalued as an
occupation that relies on the cultivation and maintenance of relationships
that “defy commodification”4 as part of caring work. To resist the stigma
of “women’s work,” librarians aim to reframe their professional identity
and professional contributions to conform to broader gendered narratives
about professional authority and control.
Critical feminist scholarship offers a way of disrupting such tendencies, challenging professional self-blame to reveal the long-standing
practices that shape what kinds of work are devalued. Such scholarship
also provides insights into how professional women can better understand
the problems they face so that they can form workable strategies for overcoming sexism and discrimination, and act for “emancipation and social
change.”5 Through this lens, this chapter considers the historical development of North American librarianship, how it is tied to broader notions of
service work as “women’s work,” and how the legacy of this history continues to inform the profession.
A Gendered Legacy Unfolds

Western librarianship was not always a field numerically dominated by
women. For many centuries, libraries and male librarians were closely tied
to the Church and places of higher learning. Prior to the humanist and
democratic developments of the 19th century, access to education and libraries was limited, designed to specifically support the intellectual interests of the wealthy and the religious, focusing on subjects like theology

3 Garcia and Barbour, “Ask a Professional,” 587.
4 Arlie Hochschild, “The Time Bind,” WorkingUSA 1, no. 2 (1997): 29,
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1743-4580.1997.tb00019.x.
5 Susan V. Iverson, “Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors: Women and Advancement in
Higher Education,” in Women as Leaders in Education: Succeeding Despite Inequality,
Discrimination, and Other Challenges, ed. Jennifer L. Martin (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger,
2011), 80.

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and philosophy.6 Intellectual works within libraries were produced by men
and their care was supervised by men. The gendered legacy of these elites
helped establish librarianship during the rise of public education in modern Western democracy. Nineteenth century figures who benefitted from
access to education and employment opportunities like Melvil Dewey,
Charles Ammi Cutter, Anthony Panizzi, Charles Gould, and Herbert Putnam founded many of the standards still used today in North American librarianship. Such men led librarianship in a time when libraries were experiencing tremendous growth that coincided with the increasing production
of print materials and demand for access to information for the purposes of
education and social advancement.7 They occupied positions of respect and
authority as library educators, chief librarians, and leaders, rising to their
positions as educated scholars. The pervasiveness of male management at
this time is demonstrated in the leadership of the American Library Association (ALA), which did not elect a woman president for the first 34 years
of its existence.
Nineteenth century librarianship began a transformation, turning
from a narrowly focused field, designed to support the reading and information interests of Western elites, to serving the literacy needs of broader
(middle-class) society by bureaucratizing public systems, like education,
to promote “social and moral order through literate (male) citizenry.”8 To
meet the labour demands stimulated by this liberal ideology, women were
invited into library work as a source of cheap labour. Although librarianship was promoted as “an ideal occupation for the educated woman who
wished to make a positive contribution to society,”9 many communities
preferred to hire untrained, local women to organize materials or relied on
middle-class “club women” volunteers to establish public libraries in small
communities. Captured in various library histories, these predominantly
white women are documented in providing access to books, instruction,
and reference services to diverse populations, including the very poor, new

6 Paul Axelrod and John Reid, Youth, University and Canadian Society: Essays in the School
History of Higher Education (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), xv.
7 Michael F. Suarez, S. J. Woudhuysen, and H.R. Woudhuysen, eds., The Oxford
Companion to the Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) Oxford Reference Online
Premium.
8 Jill Blackmore, Troubling Women: Feminism, Leadership and Educational Change
(Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1999), 25.
9 Joanne Passet, Cultural Crusaders: Women Librarians in the American West (Albuquerque,
NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 2.

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immigrants, and children.10 While women mainly performed work that
actively strove to support literacy initiatives across North America, women’s professional advancement was structured around male-dominated value systems that limited women’s access to power and benefitted from their
inexpensive (or even free) labour. This is further complicated by their civilizing and educating work to reproduce “citizens allegiant to white American ideologies regarding capitalism, gender, and authority”11 The lasting
effects of racism, segregation, and the ensuing economic and social barriers
these systems produced (and continue to produce), limited women of colour’s access to librarianship—a legacy that continues to inform the whiteness of the field.
Service Work and Femininity

Women seeking employment had to “fit” into class and race expectations
that were narrowly “coupled with the existing social interests, economic
structures, and patriarchal relations that supported the dominance of an
ideology of domesticity in the larger society.”12 Middle-class women’s suitability for certain forms of paid work, including librarianship, was predicated on their assumed “natural” affinity to mothering and domestic labour, enabling them to provide caring and routinized services that did not
require extensive education or training. In turn, this work was subject to
the rationality and supervision of more skilled professional men.13
As a largely white profession, women were expected to uphold moral standards through a configuration of femininity where white women’s
“natural” maternal abilities ensured their respectability as workers in organizations outside of the home.14 Women of colour, “marginalized in the

10 Passet, Cultural Crusaders; Kathleen Weibel, Kathleen Heim, and Dianne J. Ellsworth,
eds., The Role of Women in Librarianship, 1876–1976: The Entry, Advancement, and
Struggle for Equalization in One Profession (Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1979); Dee
Garrison, Apostles of Culture: Public Librarian and American Society, 1876–20
(Madison, WI: University of Madison Press, 2003).
11 Gina Schlesselman-Tarango, “The Legacy of Lady Bountiful: White Women in the
Library,” Library Faculty Publications 64, no. 4 (Spring 2016): 676, https://scholarworks.
lib.csusb.edu/library-publications/34.
12 Michael W. Apple, “Teaching and Women’s Work: A Comparative Historical and
Ideological Analysis,” Teachers College Record 86, no. 3 (Spring 1985): 462.
13 Apple, “Teaching and Women’s Work,” 455–57.
14 Blackmore, Troubling Women, 26.

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histories of the working class,”15 are largely invisible in this early period of
librarianship, even after the establishment of segregated libraries like the
Colored Carnegie Library in Houston in 1907.16 Librarianship’s connection to racialized and exclusionary practices “contributed to the ongoing
white racial privilege,”17 where social advancement was contingent on assimilation into white culture.
Thus, early women library professionals, framed within this white
culture, managed tensions between idealized white heterosexual femininity: physical attractiveness and care for husbands and children, and their
interests in working outside the home. All women who entered the public
sphere as workers were accepted as passive subjects, subordinate to men.18
Assumptions that masculinity dominated over femininity organized divisions in the workforce that placed men in positions to design, oversee,
and supervise the work of women. These attitudes laid the groundwork
for the ongoing gendered evolution of various professions where gender is
“built in” to their construction reflecting, as Christine Williams describes,
“a widespread cultural prejudice that men are simply better than women.”19 Women’s contributions were contained to library work that could
be linked to mothering and the care and organization of the home including managing patron queries, promoting literacy, and processing materials.
The women who sought work in libraries at this time participated
in the advancement of liberal ideals to create an informed citizenry that
was closely tied to a conditional form of egalitarianism that favoured white
men. LIS historian Joanne Passet’s chronicle of early Western American
women librarians highlights the extensive efforts some early women pioneers made to establish libraries and promote books and reading. Often

15 Sharon Harley, “Speaking Up: The Politics of Black Women’s Labor History,” in Women
and Work: Exploring Race, Ethnicity, and Class, ed. Elizabeth Higginbotham and Mary
Romero (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), 29.
16 Cheryl Knott Malone, “Autonomy and Accommodation: Houston’s Colored Carnegie
Library, 1907–22,” Libraries & Culture 34, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 95–112.
17 Todd Honma, “Trippin’ Over the Color Line: The Invisibility of Race in Library and
Information Studies,” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies
1, no. 2 (2005), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nj0w1mp.
18 Donnalyn Pompper, Rhetoric of Femininity: Female Body Image, Media, and Gender Role
Stress/Conflict (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), ProQuest Ebook Central.
19 Christine L. Williams, ed., Doing “Women’s Work”: Men in Nontraditional Occupations
(Newberry Park, CA: Sage, 1993), 3.

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finding themselves working within a “masculine milieu”20 of other community influencers, these women toiled to establish library services only
to have their legacies absorbed into gendered hierarchical bureaucracies
that they, ironically, helped to build. Later finding themselves relegated to
more routinized and clerical roles, under the direction of men, these women forged access to libraries in communities where none existed and with
few resources. They experienced notable frustration with inadequate funds
as well as being underpaid and poorly recognized for their work. Women
provided a labour solution because, unlike men, there was no social expectation that they would work after becoming married, justifying paltry
wages and few opportunities for advancement.
Women were not passive subjects in this process, both championing early feminism by advancing the interests of working women while recirculating sexist views of women’s abilities. They leveraged broader social
assumptions about women’s “purity,” “morality,” and “sensitivity” to gain
entry into the workforce by supporting claims that such attributes would
“uplift” the profession.21 Women were not liberated by their training and
education to challenge their social “place.” Rather, women were concerned
with “their search for a respectable bourgeois professional role,”22 illustrating how they worked to validate their presence within male-dominated structures. While this did facilitate women’s entry into professions, this
approach had the effect of embedding an enduring assumption that librarianship’s status issues were intrinsically related to the way women behaved.23 This is visible in examples, like that of Mary Salome Culter Fairchild, a librarian and educator of this period, who wrote:
It is quite generally conceded that in positions which do not
involve the highest degree of executive or business ability
but which require a certain “gracious hospitality,” women as
a class far surpass men. Such positions are:…the more important positions in the loan department and all work with

20 Passet, Cultural Crusaders, 153.
21 Jodi Newmeyer, “The Image Problem of the Librarian: Femininity and Social Control,”
Journal of Library History 11, no. 1 (January 1976): 44–67.
22 Jill K. Conway, “Perspectives on the History of Women’s Education in the United
States,” History of Education Quarterly 14, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 10, doi:10.2307/367602
23 Rosalee McReynolds, “A Heritage Dismissed,” Library Journal 110, no. 18 (1985): 25–31;
Newmeyer, “The Image Problem of the Librarian,” 44–67.

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children, both in the children’s room and in cooperation
with schools. Here it is said her “broad sympathies, her quick
wits, her intuitions and her delight in self sacrifice” giver her
an undoubted advantage.24
Terms like “self sacrifice” and “intuition” are linked to discourses of domesticity and motherhood and are used to normalize problematic ideologies that women are naturally suited to specific forms of work, including
service work. Such discourses define women as subjects that perform the
affective labour associated with notions of the white, middle-class domestic sphere, establishing a persistent link between librarianship and women’s work. The legacy of this connection is revealed in ongoing professional
literature around the field’s professional image, including stereotypes that
continue to fixate on librarians’ heteronormativity, whiteness, attractiveness and aspects of mothering.25
Professionalization: Devaluing Service Work

Library studies education was built on the interests and aspirations of men
like Melvil Dewey who founded the first college “library school” in 1887.
The appearance of formal library education in Canada was later, with the
first library school offering a three-week library program in 1904 at McGill
University. These programs sought to attract “college-bred” women, offering a highly practical focus that “aided women’s advancement” by offering
women a range of diverse options in acquiring library skills to work in an
assistive capacity to male librarians. The legacy of these programs remains
today, having established differentiated workers that are derived from technical programs (undergraduate diplomas and certificates in library and information technology) and, for the more advantaged, degree programs.
Figures like John Wallace, Herbert Putnam, and Melvil Dewey
advanced notions of professionalism in librarianship that were built on
the privileged, white, male assumption that “expertise [is] derived from
formal education based on science and the control of knowledge and its

24 Mary Salome Cutler Fairchild, “Women in American Libraries,” in The Role of Women in
Librarianship, 54.
25 Christina Neigel, “Loveless Frumps, Old Maids, and Diabolical Deviants:
Representations of Gender and Librarianship in Popular Culture” (EdD diss., Simon
Fraser University, 2018), https://theses.lib.sfu.ca/file/thesis/4932.

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application.”26 Librarianship was no longer simply a calling or vocation. It
was posited to be a profession where order, control, and standards were necessary. This view, influenced by the rise of scientific inquiry and misguided
beliefs that libraries must act as “neutral” channels in the dissemination of
information, obfuscates the power relations that continue to shape them as
institutions, the people who work in them, and those who can access them.
In fact, as Todd Honma critically points out, the process of “framing of the
library within the terms of ‘democracy’ and ‘neutrality’ conceals the covert
structural forms of racial exclusion that protect white racial interests,”27 including the profession’s own ongoing difficulties with whiteness.
By formalizing training and education, men in power sought to control librarianship’s development, including the shape of service work. Dewey and his contemporaries served as the gatekeepers in accessing women’s
labour to address practical concerns of managing the incredible growth of
print publishing and responding to the reconfiguration of libraries as socializing and educating spaces that required increasing interactions with
the public. Ironically, women’s influx into the field triggered a growing
anxiety about the field’s status by male librarians, expressing fear that libraries had “become grossly over-feminized …having a detrimental effect
upon the importance and prestige of public librarianship.”28 After having encouraged women to enter the field of librarianship as a “respectable”
profession, these male librarians/leaders sought to rectify the profession’s
status issues by creating educational structures that would further “professionalize” the work of librarians. Like other emerging professions at this
time (e.g. education, social work, nursing), this approach established an educational system that continues to recycle assumptions that scientific and
abstracted knowledge are valued above the people-centred work of reference, children’s services, and programming.
Despite highly visible forms of social strife that confronted people
of the early 20th century, including world wars, economic depression, the
exploitation of labourers, and a myriad of other forms of social inequality,

26 Suzanne M. Stauffer, “The Work Calls for Men: The Social Construction of
Professionalism and Professional Education for Librarianship,” Journal of Education
for Library & Information Science 57, no. 4 (Fall 2016): 312, doi:10.12783/issn.23282967/57/4/5.
27 Honma, “Trippin’ Over the Color Line.”
28 A.G.S. Enser, “Shall the Misses be Masters?,” in The Role of Women in Librarianship, 123.

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library education embraced a positivist epistemology.29 This worldview attempted to, literally, neutralize the politics of library work by scientizing
the selection, organization, and classification of materials and hiving off
reference work as a separate “specialization” deployed largely by women assistants. This division of labour was considered a necessary progression in
the growing complexities of administering libraries where, “reference aid
passed from the chief librarian to his assistants.”30 The effect was to position women as public-facing service workers performing reference, while
the management and oversight of these institutions remained under the
control of men. This division of labour ensured that the “face” of library
work, made visible to the public, was work performed by women. Women did not, necessarily, view this patriarchal structure as oppressive, with
many embracing their roles and using them as sites of resistance to pursue
social justice.31 Bookmobiles, for example, took place outside of brick-andmortar libraries and offered women librarians the autonomy of working
within communities to support literacy. Nevertheless, the quest to professionalize has been embraced by both men and women librarians.
Feminist scholar Roma Harris describes this as librarianship’s tacit “attempt to escape its female identity”32 and control the public image of
librarianship. As part of these efforts, there was a concerted movement to
accredit and streamline library education in the 20th century, ultimately phasing out undergraduate degrees in library studies and advancing
Master’s degrees which, according to LIS scholar Boyd Swigger, ultimately failed to enhance the overall social and monetary status of librarians.33
The pursuit for improved status continues, however, through the relentless
29 Michael H. Harris, “State, Class, and Cultural Reproduction: Toward a Theory of
Service in the United States,” Advances in Librarianship, no. 14 (1996): 211–52.
30 Louis Kaplan, “The Early History of Reference Service in the United States,” Library
Review 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1947): 289.
31 There are, for example, several biographies of women children’s librarians appearing in
children’s books, such as: Cynthia Grady, Write to Me: Letters from Japanese American
Children to the Librarian They Left Behind (Watertown, MA: Charlesbridge Publishing,
2018); Lucia González, The Storyteller’s Candle / La Velita de los Cuentos (New York:
Children’s Book Press, 2008); Gloria Houston, Miss Dorothy and Her Bookmobile (New
York: Harper 2011); and Jeannette Winter, The Librarian of Basra: A True Story from Iraq
(Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2005).
32 Roma Harris, Librarianship: The Erosion of a Woman’s Profession (Norwood, NJ: Alex
Publishing, 1992), 1.
33 Keith Swigger, The MLS Project: An Assessment After Sixty Years (Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow Press, 2010).

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development of Master’s degrees in information “science”, library “science,” and information “management.” A focus on management and technology curricula that embodies rules, standards, innovation, and the “digital” are preferred over the “soft” knowledge of teaching and service work.
LIS scholar Suzanne Stauffer describes these projects as ongoing efforts by
faculty to:
change the profession into something more culturally ‘masculine’ particularly by incorporating information science
and technology into the curriculum and thereby increasing
the number of men in the profession, as if a female-intensive
profession is a problem to be solved.34
In other areas of higher education, the experiences of women, as students
and, later, graduates of colleges and universities, brought to light their limited access to power. This fueled feminist action, stimulated important
critical scholarship and practical problem solving, and challenged normative discourses about gender and work. The personal became the political.35 In the absence of being tightly aligned with high profile policy issues
like public education and health, Suzanne Hildenbrand declares that there
has been little public interest in people who work in libraries. She argues
that this has limited librarianship’s uptake of feminist projects and that
“the women professionals in libraries who fight for gender justice wage
an isolated struggle.”36 Librarianship skirted the incorporation of radical
and, later, post-structuralist feminisms in its educational development, remaining centred on professionalization efforts that put assumptions about
women in conflict with views on technical expertise, rationality, and power. Further, these pursuits continue to be contained within the frame of
white, middle-class women. This has the effect of reproducing power relations that limit the possibilities for a more inclusive profession that can, at
the very least, acknowledge its whiteness and invite more intersectional approaches to theory and practice. Denial of the value of service work, largely
performed by women, has actually enabled the remaking of masculinities

34 Suzanne Stauffer, “The Work Calls for Men,” 311.
35 A term popularized after Carol Hanisch’s 1969 memo. See Carol Hanisch, “The Personal
is Political.” Writings by Carol Hanisch, February 1969, Last updated January 2006,
http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html.
36 Suzanne Hildenbrand, ed., Reclaiming the American Library Past: Writing the Women In
(Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Co., 1996), 49.

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to reassert male hegemonic worldviews, resulting in the further devaluation and intensification of control over service work.
Pushing Back

Given the slow uptake of feminist LIS work done by figures like Suzanne
Hildenbrand, Roma Harris, Jane Anne Hannigan, Mary Niles Maack and
others since the 1990s, it is not surprising that the field’s struggle with professional image and respect continues. Harris calls on librarians to identify
and challenge the external power structures that organize their work and
impede their goals because of the patriarchal ways in “which the female
endeavor is valued in this [Western] culture.”37 Librarians continue to be
tasked with changing themselves, their professional image, their leadership
style, and their service orientation to meet the expectations of neoliberal
society, conforming to practices that move away from caring work to those
which better align with corporatism.38 The effects are material. For example, Lisa Sloniowski highlights hitting the ceiling in academic institutions
where “we are viewed not as professionals, or scholars, but as support and
administrative workers”39 that limits librarian opportunities for advancement. A 2009 salary survey reported in Library Journal reveals an ongoing
pay gap between men and women librarians, with men earning more than
7% more than women. 40 Despite the field being occupied by 80% women,
there are more than 45% male faculty in LIS schools in the United States.41
The value society places on professions like librarianship are not predicated
on the work itself but on the value placed on who performs that work. Librarian stereotypes that continue to recirculate images of old maids, mothering caregivers, peevish frumps, and spinsters, speak to perceptions of
women held in broader Western culture. Harris warns:

37 Roma Harris, Librarianship, 164.
38 Jennifer Lyn Soutter, “The Core Competencies for 21st Century CARL (Canadian
Association of Research Libraries) Librarians: Through a Neoliberal Lens,” Journal of
Radical Librarianship, no. 2 (2016): 56. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/leddylibrarypub/44.
39 Lisa Sloniowski, “Affective Labor, Resistance, and the Academic Librarian,” Library
Trends 64, no. 4 (Spring 2016): 660. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lib.2016.0013.
40 Stephanie Maatta, “Jobs & Pay Take a Hit,” Library Journal 134, no. 17 (2009): 21–29.
41 Dan Albertson, Kaitlyn Spetka, and Kristen Snow, eds., Library and Information Science
Education Statistical Report 2015 (Seattle, WA: Association for Library and Information
Science Education, 2015), 3, https://ali.memberclicks.net/assets/documents/statistical_
reports/2015/alise_2015_statistical_report.pdf.

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regardless of how sophisticated and expensive their image
campaigns are, they [librarians] will not overcome negative
stereotyping until they recognize that it is the image of women and the value of women’s endeavor, not the image of particular occupations …that is responsible for their status in
the workforce.42
If library education, scholarship, and professional literature continue to
push critical feminist and intersectional work to the margins, the profession will continue to employ problematic approaches to service that reduce
service work to routinized and technological systems that work “to the disadvantage of [white/non-white, dis/abled, working/middle class] women
by progressively deskilling their labour.”43 Such practices privilege epistemological views that polarize management and service work and reassert
that belief changing practices within the profession will transform its value
in broader culture.
There is a need to push against the “self-reproducing monoculture”44of white male privilege that informs librarianship’s efforts to deskill
and devalue service work. This devaluation is rooted in the past, where
women and their contributions as paid workers are valued differently from
men. This othering of women’s work limits the possibilities for difference
(as seen in the ongoing whiteness of the field). LIS has been slow to address
gender as a normative discourse in the field, particularly in its education
programs, scholarship, and professional literature. However, the only way
to properly address the field’s ongoing issues with low pay and recognition
is to first understand how they are connected to broader social assumptions
about women and work. There is a pressing need to engage in a richer and
more open dialogue about the ways in which libraries continue to operate
as gendered workplaces. Increasingly subjected to neoliberal ideology, austerity measures, and corporatization, libraries face challenges that work
to reinforce structural inequality, not liberate it. Librarian Kathleen Weibel cautions that without feminist values, librarianship “may result in …

42 Roma Harris, Librarianship, 97.
43 Roma Harris, “Gender and Technology Relations in Librarianship,” Journal of Education
for Library and Information Science 40, no. 4 (1999): 232. JSTOR.
44 Blackmore, Troubling Women, 202.

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service built on expediency, and a lowering capacity to meet the user needs
to a level below that of its worst days as a ‘feminized’ profession.”45
Feminist post-structuralist scholarship offers librarianship a theoretical lens that can assist in untangling its enduring issues with pay and
social recognition. Such perspectives delve into the socially-constructed
practices that are situated in the politics of everyday life, pointing to discourses like femininity and masculinity that work to differentiate men and
women. In doing so, librarians can reveal the operational “rules” that establish the norms that organize our work and our lives. This is important
and necessary work because it can offer insights and forms of resistance
that change the way we approach librarianship and other professions that
engage in caring/service work. Such approaches serve to unseat certain discursive forms of power and privilege and offer all people, of all abilities, colours, and genders, greater opportunities to participate in shaping a more
nuanced and inclusive world.

45 Kathleen Weibel, “Towards a Feminist Profession,” The Role of Women in Librarianship,
292.

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