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“When I Enter”: Black Women and Disruption of the White, Heteronormative Narrative of Librarianship

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“When I Enter”: Black Women and Disruption of the White, Heteronormative Narrative of Librarianship “When I Enter”: Black Women and Disruption of the White, Heteronormative Narrative of Librarianship Caitlin M. J. Pollock and Shelley P. Haley Only the Black Woman can say "when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me." -Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South Introduction As we began the research for this chapter, it soon became clear that Black women have always been integral to first literacy movements of the 1800s and later librarianship. It also became clear that literacy, social justice activism, and literary cultural production have always intersected for middle class, educated Black women. As Michelle Garfield points out, “The Philadelphia women who organized the Female Literary Association...hoped to engage in activities that would expand their own mental capabilities. Yet they also used these skills to engage actively in political discussions regarding slavery and the rights of blacks.”1 Most important was the drive to satisfy both the collective needs of their people and their own individual needs as gifted, educated women. Garfield puts it most succinctly, “These women 1 Michelle Garfield, “Literary Societies: The Work of Self-Improvement and Racial Uplift,” in Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, ed. Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway (Burlington, VT: University of Vermont Press, 2007), 125. were not one-dimensional individuals.”2 These early literacy movements were also the beginning of the ideology of racial uplift and the obligation of the educated elite of Black America-- particularly women--to improving the lot of their less fortunate sisters and brothers.3 Even in the 19th and early 20th century, Black women negotiated race, gender, and class. The resulting societies that brought basic educational skills to the enslaved and poor people of African descent, also served as the birthing place for Black women writers. According to Garfield, “...the literary society is unique in that it brought women together with the express purpose of writing and reading their own work.”4 This history demonstrates that Black women have always operated out of a sense of communal duty and, in modern parlance, self-care. Activism, writing, and literacy have been interconnected in the history of Black women. We are attempting to place this intersectionality in the context of Black female librarianship. It should not come as a surprise that the five Black women librarians we focus on in this chapter were also writers of plays, poems, essays, children’s literature, or novels. At the same time, we would be remiss if we did not problematize and interrogate the master narrative that librarianship is a performance of white, middle-class values. That narrative comes through in now-cringe-worthy fashion in Elise Johnson McDougald’s essay “The Task of Negro Womanhood,” originally published in Alain Locke, The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (1925). McDougald, who was a groundbreaking educator in New York City and an activist,5 divides Black women into different “classes” which mimic white socio-economic 2 Ibid., 119. 3 These movements have been overshadowed by W.E.B. Du Bois’s formulation of the “talented tenth.” Clearly the Black women’s literacy movements were the precursors to that. 4 Garfield, 117. 5 Elise Johnson McDougald (1885-1971) was the first African American woman principal in New York City public schools. She was also on the supervisory committee of the North Harlem Community Forum which took place during the 1920s. She served with Regina Anderson Andrews, one of librarians we examine in this chapter. 2 classes. These consist of the “leisure class” (wives and daughters of men in business, professions, etc.) who suffer from the same difficulties finding “good help” as their white counterparts. The second is women of “business and the professions”; third, “trades and industry;” and fourth, “a group weighty in numbers struggling on in domestic service.”6 McDougald reserves special praise for the second class of women, as one would expect. She describes the women in business and the professions as “a most active and progressive group.”7 She takes note of the feminization of the field of librarianship--it has not quite evolved into “library science,” but endorses this new profession as ideally suited to the African American middle class woman. “There is an ever-present hope that, once trained, the Negro woman librarian will scatter such opportunities across the country…. [Black women librarians] are thus rendering exceptional service, and additionally creating an impetus for the enlargement of this field for Negro women.”8 These Black women were often librarians in white structures of power. They often had to struggle within those power structures that racialized and gendered them. For some of these women, they sought to contextualize their librarianship and libraries, some on a local level and some on a professional and national level. Regardless of the scope, these women had similar goals, to change, expand, and challenge libraries and librarianship. In the work of these women, we can observe the precedent and application of S.R. Ranganathan’s five laws of library science, originally published in 1931. The five laws of library science are: books are for use; every reader his/her book; every book its reader; save the time of the reader; the library is a growing 6 Elise Johnson McDougald, “The Task of Negro Womanhood,” in The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. by Alain Locke, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Originally published in 1925), 370. 7 Ibid. 8 McDougald, 376. 3 organism.9 For some of these women, their work offered critiques of libraries that did not adhere to the ethos delineated by the laws. In their quotidian work in service to a community or the Library field, the five women examined here made significant contributions to American librarianship, Black literature, and feminism. It is important that the librarians we will examine are placed within their own historical and ideological contexts. While it would be a mistake to apply more recent advances in Black feminist thought and critical race feminist theory without this acknowledgement, our analysis has benefited greatly from the main tenets of these approaches, in particular social construction and intersectionality theory. For this reason we have decided to divide the five into two groups which mirror the waves of the feminist movement in the United States. Equally important, the groupings also mirror two major waves in Black cultural and literary production, the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. In the first wave (1910-1930), we examine Nella Larsen, Pura Belpré, and Regina Anderson Andrews; in the second wave will be Ann Allen Shockley and Audre Lorde. This is just a snapshot of Black female librarianship. There were and are many more Black female librarians whose narratives are just as insightful and fascinating as the women described in this chapter. However, for many reasons, most rooted in racialized sexism, such as their absences from archives and library histories, these women do not have biographies written about them or their stories otherwise memorialized. We hope this chapter is one step in recognizing the contributions of Black women to librarianship. 9 S.R. Ranganathan, The Five Laws of Library Science, Ed. 2 reprinted, (Bangalore: Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science, 1988). 4 The First Wave: Nella Larsen, Regina Anderson Andrews, Pura Belpré Nella Larsen was born in Chicago in 1891 to a father of African descent10 and a Danish mother. She took the name Larsen from her mother’s second husband who was also Danish. Larsen felt that her social location as a biracial person (as opposed to mixed race as were so many of the Black bourgeoisie, especially in Harlem) whose mother was a European immigrant made her unique among the middle class social milieu she was associated with in New York. According to her biographer, Thadious Davis, “While race and gender were the social constructions negatively affecting her youth, they recombined in New York to inspire an internal drive toward agency, visibility and voice that went beyond mere survival.”11 While Larsen attained middle class status through her careers as a nurse, then librarian, then writer, she did not come from the middle class like so many of her friends and acquaintances in New York. She married into McDougald’s leisure class of professional wives when, in 1919 she wed Elmer S. Imes, a physicist and only the second African American to earn a Ph.D. in Physics in the United States. While still engaged in her nursing career, in June and July 1920, Larsen had published pieces in the Brownies’ Book, a magazine for African American children. After leaving her position as a nurse with the New York City Department of Health in 1921, Larsen found herself at a professional crossroads. As Davis explains, “Nursing, though respectable and increasingly professional, was not as highly regarded as a white-collar job in a library.” After working as a volunteer, in 1922, Larsen was hired as an entry-level library assistant at the 135th Street branch 10 The race and ethnicity of Larsen’s father is a Gordian knot. According to the certificate of live birth registered by the pharmacist who assisted at the birth, no race or ethnicity is listed for her father. Yet she is listed as “Colored.” The author’s statement for Alfred A. Knopf publishers (1926) notes, “Nella Larsen is a mulatto, the daughter of a Danish lady and a Negro from Virgin Islands, formerly the Danish West Indies.” 11 Thadious M. Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled, (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 4-5.
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