“Middle age spinster”. Libraries as amplifiers of discrimination

The history of the profession of librarian is inextricably intertwined with the history of the library, especially that of the last decades. The first image that comes to mind when one thinks of a library is that of a closed environment, reserved for academics and scholars, where silent employees compile paper catalogs following intricate rules. In the USA, the nature of these places has changed rapidly since the middle of the last century, when technology has forcefully become part of these realities. These structural changes have initiated a sort of revolution that has not only changed the way of understanding the library itself, but has generated a process of diversification of the work of men and women. In this study, we intend to examine the impact of technology on library workers by paying particular attention to those gender stratifications that have seen men favored for the higher positions and women biologically more suited to so-called technical services (such as cataloging) and public services (such as children’s storytelling).

These innovative and entrepreneurial ideas of his, which also proposed a "centralization" of cataloging efforts, were not shared by other library managers in the USA who, more often than not, did not even notice the modernization process they were witnessing. As a reformer, Dewey also initiated those educational processes that he considered fundamental to designing the emerging profession of the librarian, suggesting, among other things, that the ideal candidates were the women who, by their nature, paid more attention to detail and had a strong "moral sense". Dewey also argued that they had the benefit of being paid only half as much as their male counterparts and could be counted on for their dedication to their work. These were probably his motivations for strongly opposing the board of trustees of Columbia College in 1887, who did not welcome women in the School of Library Science, by starting classes in off-campus premises with twenty students, seventeen of them women. (Wiegand 1996, pp. 85-93).
At the turn of the twentieth century, white, middle-class women were increasingly attracted to activities outside their own homes; one of the main avenues for engagement in the public sphere was school and work in missions, both in America and abroad. As far as training was concerned, women's schools sought to direct women towards occupations in which they were not in direct competition with men, occupations that almost always covered the social expectations of service to less well-off communities (Muncy 1991, p. 21). As government agencies promoted public libraries, especially in rural areas of the country, other opportunities arose. By attracting the same workforce as the school system, which was predominantly female, women had the opportunity to choose an activity related to libraries: female students were instilled with a fervent desire to become 'book missionaries' with the ultimate aim of spreading the culture of reading 2 (Passet 1994, p. 2).
However, this philosophy began to lose strength when, in the 1920s and 1930s, the utilitarian aspect of book distribution took hold, geared mainly towards the consumer who had to be guided in his choices by library managers.
The utilitarian philosophy sought to improve the division of labor and raise the status of librarians by attracting more men and separating the managerial functions from lower level services. In other words, a gender structure very similar to that of the medical profession was envisaged, with a clear division between doctors (male) and nurses (female) (Brand 1996, pp. 263-271). In a survey of Public Libraries, Alice Bryan 3 reports that in the mid-twentieth century, «not a single but a dual career structure for public librarians differentiated on the basis of sex-an accelerated library career for the minority, composed of men, and a basic library career established within considerably lower limits for the majority, who are women.» (Bryan 1952, p. 86).
This division, which lasted for the whole of the last century, was further exacerbated during the period in which the information technology changed the face of libraries: the program of "automation", which had been initiated in the 1960s, taking advantage of the widespread techniques of punch cards and microphotography, 4 had begun to delineate what would be the "library of the future", while leaving unchanged the "gender dynamics of the present". That is to say, a certain "occupational segregation" began to emerge in which there was almost no female involvement for the technical positions that were associated with long and irregular hours. Such positions were not in harmony with family and domestic responsibilities.
The gender division of work has involved academic libraries and large specialized libraries, urban and suburban public libraries, local primary and secondary school libraries, and the myriad of government and corporate archives: men held disproportionately more positions of power, leadership, managerial roles, or professorships in training schools (Eddy 2001). In the rare cases where women and men were at the same level, the tendency was to distinguish sharply between male and female positions by assigning extremely disparate tasks. 5 This gender split might best be explained by one of the most relevant metaphors in the literature of the time, that of associating the librarian's job with "housekeeping". In 1970, Janet Freedman, a librarian at Salem State College Library, wrote: «With most of the creative posts dominated by men, women are likely to be utilized for their "housekeeping" talents in serials, acquisitions, and cataloging work, or for their "patience and warmth" in school libraries and children's departments.» (Freedman 1970(Freedman , p. 1711. In 1971, an assistant librarian at Princeton University, Helen Tuttle, pointed out that the leading academic and corporate professional association for libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), was clearly dominated by men and that the university's flagship journal, College and Research Libraries, had never had a female editor (Tuttle 1971).
In the same years, some statistical surveys on library work were published that related the sex and salary of the worker: confirming this disparity in economic terms, it was found that the average salary of male library directors was 30% higher than that of the few female colleagues: because of her "family duties", the woman accepted a "comfortable" job with a moderate salary instead of a higher salary in a distant city. (Carpenter and Shearer 1972). 4 The microcard was a three-inch-by-five-inch card designed to contain, on the one hand, the cataloging of an article and, on the other, the miniaturization of its full text. (Cfr. Malone 2002). 5 In 1904, Mary Fairchild, a librarian who taught cataloging in Dewey's school, had reported: «There are a few exceptions, but it is the consensus of opinion that, granted equal educational advantages, women are as well fitted as men for technical work, even the higher grades of cataloging. They are preferred by most libraries reporting far all ordinary cataloging positions because of "greater conscientiousness, patience and accuracy in details."» (Fairchild 1904, p. 158).

A tortuous route
The American Library Association (ALA) secured a spot at the World's Fair in Seattle for the first time from April 21 to October 21, 1962. The exhibition was designed primarily to imagine the role of technology in libraries, so much so that, in the assigned area, an imaginary line clearly divided the library of the "past" from that of the "future": on the one hand, there was room for traditional books placed in the classic shelves managed by librarians (mostly women), on the other hand, there was a Sperry-Rand Univac Computer with which, through some insiders (mostly men), the logic of the systems of digitization of catalogs was shown. (cfr. Downey 2007, pp. 37-52).
The American Library Association's tendency was to hold its conferences in conjunction with Universal Expositions: at the Seattle Exposition, of which it was a sponsor and whose official name was The Century 21 Exposition, ALA called its space Library-21.
Sometime later, historian Jesse Shera, dean of the School of Library Science at Case Western Reserve University, developed a kind of "code for library computerization" that he illustrated at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. 6 Its purpose was to send a signal, not only to the trade show audience, but especially to the multitude of professionals who attended, of impending change. The rise of computer science threatened to divide librarianship and overwhelm what was its humanistic core: «being traditionally humanistic, librarians doubt their capacity even to utilize anything that is scientifically derived.» (Shera 1964, p. 742).
Believing that resistance to computerization was rooted in the "fear" and "anxiety" that technology evoked, Jesse Shera has argued that it was the women workers themselves who took a step back, leaving the passage open to men who felt more willing to challenge the uncertainties that this phase of transition inevitably laid bare. The classical ideals that saw the "library" as a place to cherish freedom of speech, as a safe haven of information and a repository of memory, that is, places dedicated to serving the needs of the community, pushed to designate only women to be guardians of morality and to be promoters of reading, inevitably shifting the male contribution to projects in which library science and economics were not only predominant, but also crucial to continued change.
In 1962, Shera asserted that the reasons for the separation between librarians and documentalists, or information specialists, lay in the fact that neither had a solid theoretical background. As dean of the School of Library Science at Western Reserve University, he strongly supported the establishment of the Center for Documentation and Communication Research to promote information systems as a means of enabling librarians to operate at a higher level of information storage and retrieval. Over time, however, the Center proved to be a failure; it was entrepreneurial rather than academic in nature, meaning that its main purposes were related to the promotion of specific software rather than the dissemination of problem-solving methodologies. According to Margaret Kaltenbach, Shera's collaborator, the Center was identified more as a school of computer science than anything else, and this represented its main limitation. (Grossman 2010, p. 157) From this point on, Shera no longer indicated what was the best path to follow, distancing himself from both technology and the fear of its dominance and never taking a clear position: «The library is not a machine shop in which knowledge is fabricated by mechanical devices […] we regret the indifference, and even hostility, of many librarians to the advantages the new electronic devices, which are as yet only in their infancy, can give to improving the efficiency of man's access to recorded knowledge.» (Shera 1962, p. 764).
Librarians could learn from "technologists" and leave the Stone Age behind. Along with mathematicians, systems designers, hardware manufacturers, operations researchers, and computer programmers, they were therefore concerned with understanding «how interwoven are their interests and how overlapping their responsibilities» in libraries. (Becker and Hayes 1963, p. X) It was obvious that a positive result could only be achieved with cooperation between the various figures. The main thing we looked at instead was to assign a well-defined role to those who could best interface with the user community, that is, those who helped patrons, mediating between readers and the materials they sought, and who, in addition, perfectly performed a "cleaning service" and data control in the catalogs.
These models, which began to emerge between the sixties and seventies, in the decades to come gradually took on specific connotations, increasingly characterizing librarianship as a science oriented to meet the needs and behaviors of users. The information sciences, on the other hand, began to be associated with everything that concerned the interaction between the worker and the machine. One of the determining factors, the cause of this clear separation, was certainly the "gender" of the worker, which led to the perception of many of the traditional functions of librarianship as feminine and to draw strength from male associations in the information sciences.
From 1960 to 1980, the Council on Library Resources, which funded major projects proposed by librarians, gave very few grants to those proposed by women. The enthusiasm due to the adoption of computers had stimulated the launching of numerous experiments, but more credibility and confidence was given to those resulting from the proposals of those in positions of power. Among these, we should undoubtedly mention the project presented by a small group of representatives (exclusively male!) of the academic libraries of Ohio, whose leaders were Ralph Parker, director of the University of Missouri Library and Fred Kilgour, librarian of the Yale Medical Library. Their proposal was to use large, cumbersome mainframe computers 7 to initiate what is known as cooperative, computerized, networked cataloging of library resources. To that end, in 1967, Parker and Kilgour had founded the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC), a committee that was initially joined by 54 Ohio college libraries and that only fifty years later would include more than 16,000 members in 120 different countries, serving libraries of all types with more than 40 million research requests each day. (cfr. Maciuszko 1984) The exponential increase in the number and quality of the documents that made up the electronic catalog led to the conception of new projects that gave life to the so-called OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog), catalogs aimed at publishing documents on the web that could be accessed directly by users.
Technology was thus configured as a concept exclusive to male minds. The effects, on the other hand, were recorded mainly as an advantage for female librarians whose tasks were automated, causing further negative repercussions on their work which was considered simplified and, consequently, devalued more. For cataloguers (mainly women), already often considered less capable than library professionals, there was a strong fear that the new systems, such as OCLC or the more recent OPAC, could compromise their employment. (cfr. Petrocelli 2019, pp. 87-97).

From cards to ASCII characters: sharing between librarian and user
The cultural predominance of men over women, imposed by patriarchal society, leads men to place themselves en masse in scientific and technical careers, while girls are rather oriented towards humanistic careers [...] In our societies, the res tecnica still remains the prerogative of men. Through the mastery of the machine, he can demonstrate his superiority, and therefore his virility. (Blanquet 1999, p. 9) This superiority and virility, pointed out by the scholar Marie-France Blanquet, are even more evident and implicit if we go to look at the familiarity of women with technology: they always appear as passive users, guided and controlled by men who instead become the active agents in the management of these machines.
The policy that was adopted during the phase of technological transformation of libraries reflected, and perhaps reinforced, these canons, giving us a non-protagonistic vision of the "woman in the library", and representing, on the contrary, her passivity towards a change that was not seized as an opportunity for career advancement or improvement of working conditions. (Harris 1992, pp. 9-11) Many librarians also joined feminist movements, but few of their efforts, aimed mostly at rectifying discrimination, focused on technology-a missed opportunity given the fact that they could have expanded their computer skills to address the lack of technical support or out of professional or personal interest.
In truth, the marriage of library and information sciences seemed a far-fetched possibility to all those who gravitated around these spheres. The implications that could arise were still unknown and not the most vivid imagination could foresee a future of information technology that went beyond the realm of science fiction.
Instead, computers were assuming the role of protagonists, and, with the automation of office processes, it became almost mandatory to rethink roles in view of these changes. These changes were interpreted, in library environments, in a conflicting way, as if they represented a direct clash between intellect/information sciences and services/library economics: technology could have blurred those well-defined boundaries that had assigned precise responsibilities, rooted for decades. (Wright 1985, pp. 142-143).
In the USA, after 1980, a library that used card drawers for its cataloging system was considered behind the times. The catalog, which had been transformed from typed papers into bright ASCII characters reproduced on computer monitors, was beginning to become the real protagonist because it drew, without misunderstanding, the state of technological sophistication of the public space in which the library's patrimony was stored. Starting in the seventies, in fact, the availability of new computer technologies had caused a strong acceleration towards the use of computers and various methods of photoreproduction. The multiplication of libraries, together with the proliferation of numerous forms and dynamics of compiling electronic catalogs, had also led to the urgent need to coordinate these activities: international study committees such as UNESCO, the International Federation of Documentation (FID) and the International Federation of Librarians' Associations (IFLA-FIAB), were urged to unify bibliographic rules and systems to produce general cataloging standards that would apply internationally. As a consequence, librarianship went through a real evolutionary phase, becoming a discipline that aimed to study and modify the organization and functioning of the library, focusing on the effects of technological changes.
However, the prospect of a computerized future did not bring significant changes in the distribution of library work. Rather, dynamics began to emerge that amplified gender inequalities as computers mainly automated the work of cataloging and lending, which was predominantly done by women, but, at the same time, stimulated and encouraged the creative work that was considered the sole prerogative of male minds. In other words, if applied to men's tasks, computers represented an upskilling, an improvement in skills, but proved to be a deskilling in reference to women's work. Technological advancement had generated a retraining of librarians' tasks, who had been framed as "paraprofessionals" from professionals. Roma Harris characterizes this process as "deprofessionalizing", meaning that tasks previously performed by librarians were being assigned to non-expert staff who, as a result, cost less. The work had been fragmented and the worker had lost control over the quality and sequence of tasks. The process was divided into steps that were easier to perform, ensuring that each task could be completed by less educated and lower paid workers. (Harris 1992, p. 8).
In large libraries where adequate financial resources and skilled users were available to initiate technological experimentation, directors, supervisors, and coordinators were almost always men: «Not a single woman is in charge of a library.» (Irvine 1985, p. 9) The complexity of managing library services in an electronic environment required non-traditional skills that implied the emergence of new job positions closely related to information technology, necessary to appropriately manage the most current technologies: the electronic services librarian, the database coordinator, and the microcomputer specialist. Moreover, the information scientists, who came from recently established schools, recognized in the humanities that historical tradition, established for more than a hundred years, that would allow them to reinforce their status and enrich their curricula. In this environment, thus characterized by great change and significant mutations, «men held higher positions, were more likely to be married, did less domestic work, brought home higher salaries, and were more satisfied than women.» (Olson and Ritchie 2006, p. XVIII).
Even research publications on libraries, and not just those authored by scholars in the field, mirror this reality: they do not tell an integrated story but rather disconnected events in which either gender issues within library spaces are reported, or the extent to which technology has had implications for work arrangements is debated. In the essays and contributions written by library historians, but also by activists and educators, we find a strongly stereotyped gender language, especially on those topics that opened debates on the benefits of computerization. 8 Professional training activities had the same repercussions. In library science schools, courses such as database design and computer programming came in with great force, putting cataloging, children's services, and library history on the back burner. (Hildenbrand 1999, p. 676).
Only a small number of specialized journals had women editors: the many new journals of librarianship, strictly sectoral, related to issues close to the technologies "of the moment", did not lend themselves to female coordination. 9 It is not at all surprising, therefore, that many of these journals used highly sexist language, which was quite common at the time because it had been inherited from the daily press, which did not point out anomalies for what happened to the few women who occupied government positions, or who were employed in industry or education. (Acker 1992;Witz and Savage 1991).

From the electronic catalog to the sharing in net
By the late 1970s and early 1990s, due to the lowering of costs associated with computing power, nearly all libraries in Europe and the USA had completed the socalled automation phase. Press releases announcing the "closure of the card catalog" were the order of the day, as if to signify that the library was ready to face an "electronic future".
From this point on, the phenomenon that occurred was a kind of "turnkey market" for integrated library systems, with the consequent shift from locally developed software to primarily commercially implemented systems that followed general and collective technical standards. Having overcome and forgotten the problems associated with the flow and management of local work and operations, all libraries were then linked to these systems, resulting in significantly stronger and more independent organizations. Boundaries between internal competencies began to blur as staff responsibilities began to overlap: tasks traditionally performed by librarians were de-emphasized and often outsourced to external staff hired to support the library.
The sharing of catalogs on the "network" was therefore the real added value of the 1980s; it also became the main topic of discussion in librarianship and gave rise to a series of debates, involving both men and women, centered on the "practice of cataloging". The result was that cataloging was redefined and shifted from a humanistic and conceptual activity, coordinated by experts in classical subjects, to a manual and routine activity requiring only a minimal training process for unskilled employees. (Boss 1998, pp. 5-14).
Why these mutations? The only reference object of the library, the book, with the passage of time had turned into a general entity of "information" that did not always coincide with the "book" object and that was also identified with articles extracted from magazines, images, music CDs, videos, multimedia and hypermedia of various kinds. We were moving away from content, giving space, as Ruth Hafter points out, mostly to issues of data organization: «rules and procedures change» over time in a myriad of ways because they may need to be adapted to modern terminology, the latest scientific thinking, or innovative research practices; at the same time, users may evolve in their needs and demands; and, of course, the very technology for entering, storing, and accessing catalog data may change, affecting labor costs and delivery times for the required material. (Hafter 1986, pp. 11-12).
The approach that recognized the information sciences as the only solution to overcome the academic backwardness linked to an obsolete public service (moreover, dominated by women) was therefore emphasized. In this climate of strong tensions, those roles were assigned that still remain today and that are difficult to unhinge: men had created technology, technology was therefore the exclusive prerogative of men. Women were only its users. This relationship, unfortunately still valid, confirms that within the library, technology did not have male or female connotations, but its meaning and its use strongly differentiated the work of women and men.

"Ladies of silence"
Studying the topic only through the historical cases involving the process of computerization in libraries, a different story emerged from what is usually told, a story that is neither that of librarians programming computers in an engineering sense, nor of librarians using computers as mere clerks. It turned out, instead, to be a story of women workers organizing to change their status and wages in a highly technological environment, coming to understand the true meaning of the change only when the division of labor had already taken on a sharp demarcation furrow and generated a point of no return. Susan Hildenbrand, Professor Emeritus at the University of Buffalo's School of Library and Information Studies, argues that library-related literature has privileged the narrative of men's achievements over women's (Hilenbrand 1992, p. 18). In the rare accounts, we have available of women involved in technological change processes, narratives emerge in which the joy of their experiences is almost always tempered by the fear of «being seen as incompetent or unintelligent» (Brandon et al. 2018, p. 1) by male colleagues. The widely held stereotype that women were not capable of handling technology had no effect other than to increase their anxious state and affect their performance. (Cooper 2006, p. 324) It is as if these women have conformed to a male working standard, conditioned by the image of the professional «who didn't get involved in union issues» because «it wasn't a nice thing to do.» In this context, they appear to us as suffering and passive workers, resigned to not being able to advance in their careers and almost habituated to the constant episodes of discrimination, as if it were more important to look at the «the improvement of libraries rather than individual status.» (Cook 1977, p. 110).
In relation to all professions in which there have been high women's involvement, such as teaching or nursing, librarianship has always been numerically more restricted; this factor has certainly not facilitated the development of professional and social networks in which discrimination and difficulties could be reported: «women tend, in general, to work in a small cluster of occupational categories and find that within these categories they are underpaid, have few opportunities for advancement, and that their jobs have little prestige. Conversely, men tend to work in a wide variety of occupational categories, and relative to women, enjoy greater upward mobility, both with respect to salary and prestige.» (Harris et al. 1985, p. 174).
The most comprehensive survey we have of library workers in the USA was initiated by the Committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship (COSWL) in 1979 and published in 1983. Reading these data, it appears that there is no place, institution, association, professional figures or level of service where women are at the top in equal or greater numbers than men, or where women earn salaries greater than or equal to those of their male colleagues. (Heim and Estabrook, 1983, p. 20) It also turns out that the number of married female professionals is much lower than the number of men in long-term relationships: «whereas being married seems to have a positive effect on men's careers, it may work negatively for women.» (Martin, 1983, p. 246) After all, in our imagination associates, quite instinctively, with the word "librarian" the image of a woman, not a man, who is often elderly and unmarried, with her hair in a bun, rigid and disciplined as if she had faults to atone for, a woman who lives a detached, almost cloistered life, and who has little common sense. Certainly, these professional women, whether old or young, with their hair pulled or with the latest fashionable haircut, «receive scholars or simply curious people with a solicitude so courteous and amiable as to make this welcome seem the effect of an entirely personal regard. They are always guides, as educated as they are benevolent; they forget themselves and the occupations of the moment, making the visitors enter joyfully into the library» (Desgraves 1991, pp. 29-30) into their home, into their world.
Probably, for no other profession has so much interest been given to the image it has proposed. In truth, ordinary people do not have an accurate perception of this work, and we are rarely aware of the intellectual processes that make it possible for middle age spinsters 10 to put the right book in our hands. "Old ladies", indeed, for such they appear in our minds. One cannot overcome that contradiction that on the one hand sees these workers as helpful and friendly, while on the other makes us perceive them as boring, lacking in initiative, conservative. But this, perhaps, can be explained by the fact that the library is still understood as a place where the "old" humanistic disciplines predominate, where one-way communication systems are adopted and where a slow and impossible-to-use technology prevails.
Librarians should continue to provide these traditional services and at the same time constantly look at new technologies, accepting these changes with the conviction that they are engaging in a modern and progressive profession, trying to free future scenarios from the descriptions of the past. This could be the way forward to equalize those gender roles that are so marked in these working environments: the best of classical library theory and practice should combine with information technology to create a dynamic and diverse workforce, fulcrum of a thriving and innovative organization that finally provides an equal role for women. (Lamont 2009, p. 141).
Funding Open access funding provided by Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro within the CRUI-CARE Agreement. The submitted research is not funded.

Conflict of interest
On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.
Data availability I declare that I make my data available but do not accept the open access of the publication. All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.
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