Re: [LM_NET] Librarian Image: but I LIKE to wear my hair up!

[Ann Marie Gordon <agordon@LIVONIACSD.ORG>]

I’ve been reading all the posts about a “Librarian Image” with fascination, and 
can’t resist sharing a story.

I was at a neighborhood playground, watching my daughters run around, and struck up 
a conversation with another mother.  I mentioned that I worked in a primary school, 
and she asked me what I did.  I told her I was a librarian.  She looked at me for a 
moment, and then asked me if I didn’t feel that I had betrayed my feminist ideals 
by choosing a profession that was traditionally female.  Didn’t I owe it to my 
daughters, she said, to show that women didn’t have to be nurses, teachers, 
homemakers, or librarians?   (Since I’m a librarian/teacher/homemaker, I was truly 
a bad example for my kids.)  

Once I got my jaw off the ground, I responded as civilly as I could, but just think 
about what her question implies.  She was essentially telling me that I ought to 
behave a certain way so that my daughters would draw the correct conclusions about 
the place of women in the world.  The argument about a librarian’s image seems to 
me to come perilously close to this line of reasoning.  So*it follows*if I don’t 
want the general public to draw erroneous conclusions about librarians, I must wear 
contacts instead of glasses, and NEVER, ever, wear my hair up.  

If I need bifocals next year, do I have to quit my job?  Should every female 
librarian be required to be married, to avoid the label “spinster librarian?”  

I’m one of four librarians in my family.  We can boast a retired reference 
librarian from Boston Public Library, a librarian at the Harvard Law Library, the 
head of the patient/staff library at a local hospital, and a school librarian (me!) 
 None of us is “typical.”  Why should it matter that my aunt is not a “twinset & 
pearls” kind of lady, and my mother is?  I’ll bet none of us has ever said “shush” 
in our lives. As long as we’re skillful, flexible, welcoming, why should it matter 
if I “look” like some mythical typical librarian?   

I look GREAT with my hair up!  


Anne-Marie Gordon, Librarian
Livonia Primary School
Livonia, NY
agordon@livoniacsd.org
http://www.livoniacsd.org/primaryschool/gordon/index.htm

"A life without stories would be no life at all."  --from Alexander McCall Smith's, 
In the Company of Cheerful Ladies.

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