43 - The feminisation of librarianship: the writings of Margaret Reed

Summary

Between 1911 and 1913, The Librarian and Book World published a column entitled ‘Women's work in libraries’. Little is known about the author, Margaret Reed, who said her brief was to write on ‘anything of interest to women librarians and assistants, from high politics to dress’. A point of increasing interest at this time was women workers' equality with men. Around the turn of the twentieth century, debates about women workers shifted from a focus on their suitability for library work towards discussions of their equality with men. Margaret Reed's articles provide one articulation of the variety and extent of understandings of equality as this began to be considered in relation to library employment. Significantly, these discussions appear in a column which, for the first time, was addressed to women workers. Whilst some concerns, such as equal pay, were also pertinent to men, others more exclusively impacted on women. For example, debates about the need for women, but not men, to have uniforms or overalls are raised in several articles. The column is discussed in the latter part of this chapter which, owing to the paucity of work in this area, begins with a consideration of women's employment in libraries between 1850 and 2000 to contextualise the appearance of Reed's column in 1911.