The lady and the Library Loafer: Gender and public space in Victorian America

Winterthur Portfolio

Volumn 31, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 221-242

  Van Slyck, Abigail A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34247680240     PISSN: 00840416     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/496694     Document Type: Article

References (127)

1. It is difficult to summarize the full extent of the ladies' reading room phenomenon, since these facilities are routinely ignored in library history. However, primary documents reveal that 8 of the 18 public libraries built in New Zealand with Carnegie funds included ladies' reading rooms when they opened in the early twentieth century, while 22 public libraries in Great Britain included such facilities in the 1890s. "Women's Reading Rooms," The Library 4 (1892): 108-11.
2. For a discussion of the use of this concept in women's history, see Linda K. Kerber, "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History," Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (June 1988): 9-39.
3. Thanks to scholars such as Dolores Hayden, Gwendolyn Wright, Sally McMurry, and Annmarie Adams, we now have a very good sense of the specific architectural forms and interior decorating practices that sustained ideas of "true womanhood" in middle-class houses throughout the Anglo-American world. See Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981);
4. Dolores Hayden, "Catherine Beecher and the Politics of Housework," in Susana Torre, ed., Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1977), pp. 40-49;
5. Gwendolyn Wright, "Domestic Architecture and the Cultures of Domesticity," Design Quarterly 138 (Spring 1987): 13-19;
6. Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1873-1913 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);
7. Annmarie Adams, Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1000 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996);
8. Sally McMurry, Families and Farmhouses in Nineteenth-Century America: Vernacular Design and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
9. For more on these residential structures in the late nineteenth century, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984);
10. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, "Hull-House as Women's Space," Chicago History 12, no. 4 (Winter 1983): 40-55;
11. Annmarie Adams, "Rooms of Their Own: The Nurses' Residences at Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital," Material History Review 40 (Fall 1994): 29-41;
12. Karen Kingsley, "The Architecture of Nursing," in Anne Hudson Jones, ed., Images of Nurses: Perspectives from History, Art, and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), pp. 63-94;
13. Paul Groth, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);
14. Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
15. For more on the range of public spaces, see William D. Moore, "The Masonic Lodge Room, 1870-1930: A Sacred Space of Masculine Spiritual Hierarchy," in Elizabeth Collins Cromley and Carter L. Hudgins, eds., Gender, Class, and Shelter: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture V (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), pp. 26-39;
16. Cynthia Rock, "Building the Women's Club in Nineteenth-Century America," Heresies 11, vol. 3, no. 3 (1981): 87-90;
17. Karen Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America, 1890-1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994);
18. Gunter Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980);
19. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988);
20. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1976; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989);
21. Angel Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994);
22. David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at Play (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1985).
23. For the role of men in the home, see Margaret Marsh, "Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity, 1870-1915," American Quarterly 2, no. 40 (June 1988): 165-86;
24. Cheryl Robertson, "Male and Female Agendas for Domestic Reform: The Middle-Class Bungalow in Gendered Perspective," Winterthur Portfolio 26, nos. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 1991): 123-41;
25. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977);
26. Katharine Martinez, "The American Home as Exhibition Space" (Paper presented at the "Gendered Space and Aesthetics" session of the American Studies Association conference, 1995). For women's use of department stores and other cultural institutions, see Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986);
27. Horowitz, Culture and the City;
28. Anne Firor Scott, "Women and Libraries," Journal of Library History 21, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 400-405.
29. For municipal housekeeping, see Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992);
30. Madeline Stein Wortman, "Domesticating the American City," Prospects 3 (1977): 531-72.
31. "The Newark (N.J.) Free Public Library," Library Journal 14, no. 11 (November 1889): 437.
32. Mary R. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 78.
33. For women's parlors on steamboats, railroad cars, and in commercial photographs, see Katherine C. Grier, "Imagining the Parlor, 1830-1880" in Gerald W. R. Ward, ed., Perspectives on American Furniture (New York: W. W. Norton for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1988), pp. 205-39;
34. see also Benson, Counter Cultures;
35. Carolyn Brucken, "In the Public Eye: Women and the American Luxury Hotel" in this issue of Winterthur Portfolio;
36. Galen Cranz, "Women in Urban Parks," Signs 5, no. 3 (Spring 1980 supplement): S80-85;
37. Rock, "Building the Women's Club";
38. Blair, Torchbearers;
39. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift;
40. Horowitz, "Hull-House as Women's Space."
41. Lynne Walker, "Vistas of Pleasure: Women Consumers of Urban Space in the West End of London, 1850-1900," in Clarissa Campbell Orr, ed., Women in the Victorian Art World (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 79. Although Walker writes about the English scene, her interpretation is implicit in many studies of women's spaces in the United States;
42. Cynthia Rock, for instance, characterizes the building of a women's club as "the claiming of space" (Rock, "Building the Women's Club," p. 88),
43. while Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz refers to Hull-House as a setting that allowed residents "to plunge into the life of their time" (Horowitz, "Hull-House as Women's Space," p. 55).
44. Ryan, Women in Public, pp. 66-68.
45. An inherent faith in the notion of progress may also play a role in the tendency to interpret any female presence in the city as emancipatory. Many scholars seem to hold fast to the idea that women's lives are getting better and assume that the late nineteenth century must, therefore, represent an improvement in women's lives over the beginning of the nineteenth century.
46. Kenneth A. Breisch, "Small Public Libraries in America, 1850-1890: The Invention and Evolution of a Building Type" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1982), pp. 68-70;
47. Athenaeum Centenary: The Influence and History of the Boston Athenaeum from 1807-1907 (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1907), pp. 35-37, 40.
48. Quoted in Athenaeum Centenary, p. 41.
49. The phrase bodily management and the analysis of its application to Victorian women come from John F. Kasson's study of nineteenth-century etiquette books; John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), pp. 128-132.
50. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, pp. 126-27.
51. "Ladies in Libraries," Library Journal 11, no. 10 (October 1886): 420; "Women's Reading Rooms," The Library 4 (1892): 109.
52. The cartoon "Chaos in the Lending Library" was the frontis-piece to an anonymous pamphlet entitled "The Truth About Giving Readers Free Access to the Books in a Public Lending Library," printed in 1895 and reproduced in Thomas Kelly, History of Public Libraries in Great Britain, 1845-1975 (London: Library Assoc., 1977), p. 179.
53. Recent studies of mid nineteenth-century book-borrowing records suggest that reading preferences were not as gendered as librarians and library boards believed. For an example, see Ronald J. Zboray, "Reading Patterns in Antebellum America: Evidence in the Charge Records of the New York Society Library," Libraries and Culture 26, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 301-33.
54. The Eighteenth Annual Report of the Peoria Public Library (Peoria, Ill.: By the library, 1898), pp. 6-7.
55. For women as a moral influence in public institutions, see Cranz, "Women in Urban Parks," pp. S80-85.
56. For women in the paid workforce of American librarianship, see Joanne Passett, Cultural Crusaders: Women Librarians in the American West, 1900-1917 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994);
57. Dee Garrison, Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876-1920 (New York: Free Press, 1979), pp. 173-241;
58. Laurel Grotzinger, "Biographical Research: Recognition Denied," Journal of Library History 18, no. 4 (Fall 1983): 372-81;
59. Mary Niles Maack, "Toward a History of Women in Librarianship: A Critical Analysis with Suggestions for Future Research," Journal of Library History 17, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 164-85;
60. Barbara E. Brand, "Librarianship and Other Female-Intensive Professions," Journal of Library History 18, no. 4 (Fall 1983): 391-406;
61. Wayne Wiegand, "The Development of Librarianship in the United States," Libraries and Culture 24, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 99-109.
62. Western women were so active in establishing and administering libraries for their towns that in 1933 the American Library Association credited women's clubs with initiating 75 percent of the public libraries then in existence. Victoria Kline Musmann, "Women and the Founding of Social Libraries in California, 1859-1910" (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1982), p. 33, citing Sophonisba P. Breckenridge, Women in the Twentieth Century: A Study of Their Political, Social, and Economic Activities (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933).
63. The connection between women's clubs and library organizing has been well documented; see Scott, "Women and Libraries"; Louise Caldwell Bocock, "Texas Libraries and the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs," Texas Library Journal 62, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 26;
64. Deanna B. Marcum, "The Rural Public Library in America at the Turn of the Century," Libraries and Culture 26, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 91;
65. David Taylor, "Ladies of the Club: An Arkansas Story," Wilson Library Bulletin 59, no. 5 (January 1985): 324-27;
66. June O. Underwood, "Civilizing Kansas: Women's Organizations, 1880-1920," Kansas History 7, no. 4 (Winter 1984-85): 300.
67. "Absorbing the Athenaeum," Otago Daily Times, February 1, 1908, p. 13;
68. W. E. Doubleday, "Public Libraries and the Public," quoted in Library Journal 37, no. 12 (December 1912): 681;
69. H. G. T. Cannons, Bibliography of Library Economy (Chicago: American Library Assoc., 1927), p. 506.
70. For the elite nature of nineteenth-century public libraries, see Michael H. Harris, "The Purpose of the American Public Library: A Revisionist Interpretation of History," Library Journal 98, no. 16 (September 15, 1973): 2509-14;
71. Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow, pp. 206-19; Phyllis Dain, "Public Library Governance and a Changing New York City," Libraries and Culture 26, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 219-50.
72. For Richardson's library commissions, see Breisch, "Small Public Libraries"; Ann Melissa Gilkerson, "The Public Libraries of H. H. Richardson" (Honors thesis, Smith College, 1978).
73. For the role of women in Massachusetts libraries, see Kathleen James, "Masculine and Feminine: The Shifting Image of the Public Library in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts" (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, 1985). For the library activities of women's study clubs, see note 15.
74. For the physical form of ad hoc libraries established by women's clubs, see Abigail A. Van Slyck, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 128-33.
75. For purpose-built libraries, see Breisch, "Small Public Libraries";
76. and James, "Masculine and Feminine." For more on the Winn Memorial Library and the architectural expression of paternalistic philanthropy,
77. see Abigail A. Van Slyck, " 'The Utmost Amount of Effectiv [sic] Accommodation': Andrew Carnegie and the Reform of the American Library," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 50, no. 4 (December 1991): 359-83.
78. Nathaniel Shurtleff, A Decimal System for the Arrangement and Administration of Libraries (Boston, 1856), quoted in Breisch, "Small Public Libraries," pp. 91-92.
79. Negative evidence is always difficult to interpret, so I am grateful to Kathleen James for suggesting this explanation for why so few Massachusetts libraries included ladies' reading rooms.
80. William F. Poole, "Small Library Buildings," Library Journal 10, nos. 9/10 (September/October 1885): 250-56. The Library Journal was first issued in 1876. Between that time and 1897 (when ladies' reading rooms began to disappear from American public libraries), the Library Journal published illustrations (plans or elevations or both) of 44 American public library buildings. Of these, 14 definitely included ladies' reading rooms. In 6 other cases, the information provided in the Library Journal is insufficient to determine the existence of a ladies' reading room.
81. R. R. Bowker, "Some Libraries of the Northwest," Library Journal 20, no. 3 (March 1895): 79.
82. O. B. Dodge Library, Architectural Review 9, no. 1 (January 1902): 49;
83. "The Minneapolis Public Library," Library Journal 16, no. 6 (June 1891): 176-79;
84. "The Peoria Public Library," Library Journal 22, no. 3 (March 1897): frontispiece, 145;
85. The Buffalo Library and Its Building, Illustrated with Views (Buffalo, N.Y.: By the library, 1887), p. 30.
86. Bowker, "Some Libraries of the Northwest," pp. 78-79.
87. Buffalo Library, p. 30;
88. The Hackley Public Library of Muskegon, Michigan (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1891), p. 89;
89. Bowker, "Some Libraries of the Northwest," p. 79.
90. "Newark (N.J.) Library," p. 440.
91. For the symbolic associations of the domestic parlor, see Katherine C. Grier, "The Decline of the Memory Palace: The Parlor after 1890," in Jessica Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth, eds., American Home Life, 1880-1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998), pp. 53-54.
92. G. F. Winchester, "The Danforth Library Building," Library Journal 16, no. 10 (October 1891): 308.
93. Althea Warren, San Diego city librarian 1916-26, quoted in Clara E. Breed, Beginnings: San Diego Public Library History, 1882-1970 (San Diego: By the library, 1970), p. 3.
94. Helen Hooven Santmyer, Ohio Town (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1963;
95. reprint, New York: Berkley Books, 1985), p. 202.
96. For late nineteenth-century commercial spaces, see James M. Mayo, The American Grocery Store: The Business Evolution of an Architectural Space (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), pp. 52-54;
97. William Leach, "Strategies of Display and the Production of Desire," in Simon J. Bronner, ed., Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920 (New York: W. W. Norton for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1989), pp. 100-106;
98. Thomas J. Schlereth, "Country Stores, County Fairs, and Mail-Order Catalogues: Consumption in Rural America," in Bronner, Consuming Visions, pp. 339-56.
99. For British discussions of the newspaper room, see J. Elliot, "Extinction of the Betting Evil in Public Newsrooms," Library 5 (1893): 193-94;
100. R. K. Dent, "Introduction to Discussion on Blacking Out of Sporting News in Libraries," Library 6 (1894): 127-29.
101. For the Boston situation, see Breisch, "Small Public Libraries," pp. 91-93.
102. According to Walter Muir Whitehill, "the high standard of decorum among users of the library made such segregation of the sexes unnecessary" (Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston Public Library: A Centennial History [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956], p. 57).
103. "Design for the Woburn Library," American Architect and Building News 2, no. 63 (March 10, 1877): between pp. 76 and 77.
104. "Free Public Library, San Diego, California," Architectural Record 9, no. 1 (January 1902): 48.
105. For women as library criminals, see "Ladies in Libraries," p. 420;
106. B. Wood, "Women's Reading Rooms," Library 4 (1892): 108-11;
107. Amian L. Champneys, Public Libraries: A Treatise on Their Design, Construction, and Fittings (London: B. T. Batsford, 1907), p. 88.
108. For Victorian prohibitions on calling attention to bodily functions, see Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, pp. 124-26.
109. For British debates about public toilets for women, see Walker, "Vistas of Pleasure," p. 77. On Allegheny City situation, see "Andrew Carnegie's Gift," The Bulletin, clipping preserved in the Carnegie Corporation Archives, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. It is also worth noting that the men's toilet could be reached either through the public delivery room or directly from the librarian's private office, a clear indication that librarianship was still understood to be a male profession in the 1880s.
110. See also "The Brooks Library Building," Library Journal 12, no. 3 (March 1887): 130-34;
111. "Portland Library Association Building," Library Journal 20, no. 3 (March 1895): opp. p. 79.
112. "The Stratford Library," Scientific American, Building Edition (June 1896): 95.
113. For the mirror as a device to remind women that they were on display, see Brucken, "In the Public Eye."
114. For tableaux vivants and other parlor theatricals, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 174-87;
115. Robert M. Lewis, "Tableaux Vivants: Parlor Theatricals in Victorian America," Revue Française d'Etudes Américaines 8, no. 36 (April 1988): 280-91.
116. "Danforth Library Building," Bulletin of the Paterson Free Public Library 4, no. 1 (December 1901): 13;
117. Eleventh Annual Report of the Carnegie Free Library, Allegheny City (n.p., 1901);
118. Plans, Views, and Descriptions of the Free Public Library Building of Cleveland (Cleveland: Free Public Library, 1893);
119. Annual Report of the Cleveland Public Library (Cleveland: By the library, 1901), pp. 60-62.
120. For links between librarianship and social reform, see Garrison, Apostles of Culture, pp. 196-225;
121. Van Slyck, Free to All, pp. 174-76.
122. For the impact of the Carnegie library program on children's reading rooms, see Van Slyck, Free to All, pp. 179-92.
123. For the rearrangement of the Hackley Library, see Marilyn Andersen, The Hackley Public Library: A Centennial History (Muskegon: Marilyn Andersen, Hackley Public Library, and Public Schools of the City of Muskegon, 1990).
124. Arthur E. Bostwick, The American Public Library (New York: D. Appleton, 1910), p. 67.
125. John Cotton Dana, "Women in Library Work," The Independent 71, no. 3270 (August 3, 1911): 244-50.
126. For women and professional librarianship, see Van Slyck, Free to All, pp. 173-92;
127. Garrison, Apostles of Culture, pp. 207-17.