Mabel Dunham: Librarianship as a Profession for Women, May 1921

    At the end of her year as president of the Ontario Library Association in March 1921, B. Mabel Dunham, the chief librarian of the Kitchener Public Library since 1908, selected a topic of major importance at the OLA’s twenty-first meeting: “Library Work as a Profession for Women.” For the most part, press reports shortened the topic by omitting “for Women” but briefly reported her main remarks. Library journals, such as Public Libraries, which covered the meeting in its May issue, had little to say about Dunham’s speech. It reported, “Miss Dunham’s paper was a very able plea for library work as a means of service to the community and development of one’s highest personality.” The Library Journal reported that “Miss Dunham ranks library work as one of the high callings for women, inasmuch as it presents an opportunity for service to the community and for building up one’s own character and personality.” The synopsis in the May issue of the Ontario Library Review observed that she “upheld the high ideals of our calling.” An experienced librarian, Marjorie Jarvis, from Toronto’s reference library, provided the most detail for the Review:

She spoke of the present lack of standards, of positions given to local applicants instead of trained workers, of the indifference of many library boards, who consider a board meeting a social event. Against this she set the opportunities library work afford both of self-education and then of wide influence, the openings for originality and initiative. These she pointed out were attractive to the college graduate who felt her responsibility for service and had the trained mind and wide mental outlook which were necessary for one who wished to do ‘pioneer work in a new educational field.’

If Mabel Dunham hoped to arouse vigorous discussion at the Association, she would not be entirely satisfied. There had been many articles on professionalism in libraries and women’s entry into librarianship for three decades, especially in the United States. However, she felt it necessary to address these issues in the current postwar era when new expectations were being formed about Canadian society in the 1920s.

Mabel Dunham introduced her topic by outlining women’s societal progress before linking professional work in libraries with young female university graduates. Her viewpoint took for granted whiteness and middle-class values in the field of library work for professionally minded women—the “few favored ones.” She did not address the position of library assistants or women, such as the Bishop Strachan School graduate Marjorie Jarvis, who relied on lesser educational qualifications and experience to gain a reputation in libraries. Excerpts from her speech, which resides at the Archives of Ontario in the Ontario Library Association fonds on microfilm holdings MS-907, follow.

    “These are days when women are filling a much great place in public life in Canada than ever before. Half a century ago it was a universally-accepted belief that women’s sphere was in the home, but now the most confirmed woman-hater is discreetly silent, though he sees women engaged in all manner of competitions once sacred to the lords of creation. Women work in our factories, our stores, our banks; they are to be found in medicine, in law and in the applied sciences. They serve on our municipal boards, on our provincial commissions and they have invaded the unholy realm of politics. They have, perhaps as a result of the nature of their work in the world war, come to realize that, as citizens, it is their native right and also their duty not to complete with men as rivals but to cooperate with them in the common task of making Canada a better place for men and women and little children to live in.

    “Unfortunately, the great majority of women of Canada are allowed to begin the battle of life with but very little training. When they have passed through the elementary schools at the age of fourteen or fifteen, they enter industrial or domestic, or commercial life. Naturally enough, they are fit for little else than manual labor. They give themselves up to the monotony of a life of routine and rarely rise above it. Some are fortunate enough to be able to attend the secondary schools and at eighteen or thereabouts they find themselves called upon to choose among the callings that are open to women of their training. A very few favored ones there are for whom the choice of a profession is postponed until after they have graduated from the university.

    “Canadian women are availing themselves of the advantage of higher education and year by year an increasing number of young women graduate from our universities. Eagerly they have been looking from their cloistered windows into the busy world and trying to find a place in it for themselves. Not one of them but hopes ‘to serve the present age,’ as to live and work among people of education and refinement, to be in a position to continue her own education, and, withal, to earn at least a competence. These are the requisites of a happy life.

     “Prominent among the professions that come up for consideration when a girl is choosing her vocation in life is Library work. She has learned to love the college library, its corridors, its books, its very silences. She has proved it to be a friend in need and a very present help in time of trouble. She remembers that it is more blessed to give than to receive and she pictures herself in a librarian’s chair, doing for others what others have done for her.  ... To be in a position to direct the reading and thinking of a whole community is a work that comes to her as a challenge. To be able at the same time to continue her own education amid the most pleasant surroundings she regards as a privilege.

    “It is a profession that is eminently suited to women. If numbers prove anything, it is, like teaching, a profession that men use as a stepping-stone to other professions but this cannot be said of the men engaged in library work in Canada. They have drifted into the profession from many other walks in life and they hold their positions, like our judges, for life and good conduct. They are for the most part managers of large libraries and are surrounded by a corps of assistants who are either trained or experienced workers in the various departments of library service. There are a few women who have shown themselves not only capable managers of large libraries but also conversant with the work of every department, and through the country the majority of workers holding important library posts are women.

Mabel Dunham, n.d. (c. 1920)

    “But, although there are good positions in library work in Canada, there are few openings and advancement in the profession is slow and uncertain. There are too many instances of University women who have taken library courses but who have failed to get a footing in the library world. When vacancies occur, preference is usually given to local applicants without any special regard for educational or professional qualifications. That there are pecuniary considerations back of these conditions I will not deny. Library appointments, when once made, are more or less permanent. Year after year goes by and no questions are raised as to the competency of the person appointed, no inquiry is made into the measure of her development intellectually and professionally, an no interest is shown in the reputation of the Library either locally or provincially. Too many librarians, whether they realize it or not, are merely marking time. The tragedy of it is that nobody seems to care so long as they keep off other people’s corns. This fact cannot be gainsaid, the majority of women engaged in library work in Canada began in their own home town and have not departed from it.

    “The result of this practice has been that library work, in Ontario at least, is called a profession by courtesy only. To state that a woman is a librarian means nothing at all. It means something to be called a teacher, a doctor, a nurse, or a lawyer. Everyone knows without being told that these persons have successfully passed certain examinations, both academic and professional. There are certain standards to which they must have attained. ... But in library work there are no such standards set. For years the bars have been down to all comers and, naturally enough, a number of untrained people have wandered in. These have unintentionally though non the less effectively, kept low the status of library work as a profession.

    “The librarian has so much to do with her Library Board that she is wise if she considers well, before accepting an appointment, whether or not she can work with them. It is not always an easy task to please nine men with nine different minds, and the presence of women on the Board may accentual the difficulty.

    “But along with the limitations and weaknesses of library work as a profession there are many compensations. It has, indeed, very much to commend it as a profession for earnest, trained women.

    “Certainly it is educational work and it is only for the ignorant who despise education. Every thoughtful man and woman knows that all true education has for its object the formation of character, and, after all, character is the one thing in all that really matters. The Public Library is or should be an integral part of public education. By all the rules of logic it is evident that library work is a holy service.

    “Leisure is not only a test of character but, and this means more to the educationalists, it furnishes a life-long opportunity to develop and mould character. For this reason it is sacred.

    “The Public Library is the one institution that has in view the education and culture of the people by their own volition during their periods of leisure. ... People come and read because they love to read or because they are in need of help which the Library can afford. ... The librarian meets, under the most pleasant conditions, people whom she would never meet through any school, or club, or office, or church, people of all ages, all races, and all creeds. She creates a municipal home where all may meet as equals by the common right of citizenship. ... She becomes a friend and co-worker with the teachers, the preachers and all others who have at heart the public weal and the library under her management becomes a mighty social factor in the community.

    “Another boon library work has to offer, namely the priceless privilege of showing initiative and originality. ... The librarian who would be worthy of the profession she has chosen must be awake and resourceful. There is no room for automatons in library work, for it is a pioneer effort in a relatively new educational field and only those can follow the plough and dig well the furrows who know the rules and are willing to use both hands.

   “It is to equip boys and girls with the keys that will open the doors to great storehouses of literature that their father knew not of. It is to create within them such interests and ambitions as will help them to avoid many of the pitfalls of life into which boys and girls of an earlier generation have fallen. It is, in short, to raise the type of men and women of the Canada of to-morrow.

   “But no woman, however brilliant and earnest, should undertake library work without some measure of professional training.  ... A librarian must learn to know books by their index and contents pages, to use them not only as sources of information but as tools to guide her to information in other books. She must know how to select books wisely and how to buy them economically. She must familiarize herself with systems of classification and methods of cataloguing. She should know what equipment is necessary and where to procure it most advantageously. She must understand methods in staff and budget management and she must be able to think of things so automatically that she will not waste her energies on the mere machinery of library work and run the risk of losing sight of the real meaning and object behind all her work.

    “The pity of it is that so many of us librarians of experience seem to be people of circumscribed vision. ... There is a verse somewhere in the Bible which reads: ‘Where there is no vision the people perish.’ I trust that I may not some day be found guilty of distorting or misapplying scripture if I suggest that it may have some bearing on the library situation in the Province of Ontario in this our day of grace.”

Mabel Dunham’s comments speak to an emerging profession in Ontario after the Great War. She was wholeheartedly in favour of providing advanced library training for young women seeking a professional career. At the same time, she cautioned that librarianship was circumscribed by few openings, beset by uncertain advancement, and impeded by some male directors who regarded their board tenure as a right. Library work is a “holy service,” Dunham declared when she sought to encourage the young female university graduate to better her career opportunities and develop her character. The 1920s would witness the establishment of graduate library education at the University of Toronto and McGill University and the increase of women as administrators in public libraries in Ontario.

Further reading:

Mabel Dunham’s biography is at Wikipedia and in another blog on the Library History Today website.