‘Eminently Suited to Girls and Women’: The Numerical Feminization of Public Librarianship in England 1914–31

Abstract

This study investigates the rapid growth in the number of women employed in English public libraries in the years between the outbreak of World War I and the census of 1931, building on earlier work which highlighted the long-term causes that led women to view the library workplace as respectable in the long nineteenth century. The article argues that the demographic upheaval caused by World War I, the provisions of the Public Libraries Act of 1919, the library-building activity of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and the library employment advocacy of the Central Bureau for the Employment of Women completed the feminization of English public librarianship during the first third of the twentieth century.