A/Prof Mary Carroll
Over the last few months, I have been investigating the experience of women in librarianship in Australia using the extant literature to see how this experience has been documented. This small project came about in response to a request to contribute to a festschrift in memory of highly regarded US scholar Mary Niles Maack. Maack ‘s areas of expertise were in comparative librarianship, the history of the book, and women’s history. Her works are both insightful and far reaching laying out templates for future research in these areas. For this project I decided to focus on two aspects of Maack work— the experience of women, and comparative librarianship.
Librarianship in Australia has traditionally been considered a feminized profession with over 80% of all librarians in the twenty first century identifying as women. However, this was not always the case as Figure 1 from the Public library of Victoria in 1931 illustrates. In this study, I focussed on discovering the reasons why, over time, the number of women in Australian librarianship changed, and what this had to tell us about their experience in the workplace. What I found firstly through a review of the literature was that there has been surprisingly very little research about the experience of women librarians in Australia. The literature that does exist tends to focus on two major areas. The first is histories of the experience of a group who have been labelled by historians as the ‘first generation’ of Australian women librarians who worked at the Public Library of New South Wales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Cleary 1991, Biskup 1994). The second area appearing in the literature emerges in the late 1970s and 1980s and is largely practice based literature about the ongoing inequities for women in conditions and status in the library workforce in Australia at that time. This concern with the status of the profession in relation to women is a recurring theme in the literature over many decades with frequent evidence of calls to de-feminise the professional level of librarianship as a means to raise its professions status or to restrict women to particular parts of library work i.e. children’s librarianship. Further findings of this research will probably come as little surprise but are still worth reflection both from an historical and comparative perspective and to foreground the ongoing implications of gender-based inequities for librarianship in the future.
Figure[Library staff, State Library of Victoria] [picture]. (1931). From the collection of the State Library of Victoria
The first is that the entry of women into librarianship in Australia was seen for a large period of time as a problem requiring a solution if the profession was to succeed in raising its status—an ongoing (and possibly continuing) concern of the profession.
Secondly, restrictions on women’s work in libraries were assisted by various legislative decisions including the introduction in 1912 of Commonwealth legislation which set the wage of women in the federal public services at 54% of their male counterparts. The reduction of women’s wage aligns closely with the increase of women working in libraries.
Thirdly, despite the numerical increases, the experience for women librarians historically differed greatly to that of men with leadership and professional status and ongoing job security often elusive. In addition to wage inequities as noted above a raft of what are popularly known as ‘Marriage Bar Acts’ prevented married women being employed in the public service. Such legislation severely impacted women in the workplace. Such Acts were repealed by the last third of the twentieth century opening the way for new generation of women making it possible to sustain careers. The following decade were to see a number of firsts. These firsts included the first female federal parliamentary librarian, Roxanne Missingham, the first female state librarians including, Alison Crook (NSW), Jane La Scala(Vic), Frances Awcock (SA), Lea Giles-Peters (Qld) and the National Library of Australia’s first woman Director-General Jan Fullerton. The story of this new generation and their experience is yet to be fully explored.
The full paper about this research ‘“A Start Must Be Made”: An Evaluation of the Published History of Women in Australian Libraries’ will be published in Library Trends volume 72 issue 3 in 2024.
References
Biskup, Peter. 1994. “Gender and Status in Australian Librarianship: Some Issues.” The Australian Library Journal 43: 165-79.
Cleary, Jim. 1991b. “Women Librarians at the Public Library of New South Wales: The First Generation.” Peopling a Profession: Papers from the Fourth Forum on Australian Library History, Monash University, 25 and 26 September 1989I, edited by Frank Upward and Jean P. Whyte, 141-162. Melbourne: Ancora Press.
[Library staff, State Library of Victoria] [picture]. (1931). From the collection of the State Library of Victoria
