Surveys At Ala Conferences, 1882-85

By Author: Henter White
Total Articles: 73
Comment this article

When the ALA executive board met to plan the 1882 conference, they asked some librarians to make reports on topics of interest to the library community. They appointed "chairmen" for the following seven sections, or topics, for reports: general progress of library interests, legislation, buildings, cataloging and classification, aids and guides for readers, fiction, and reading of the young. The board asked each chairman to "carefully collect and preserve everything bearing on Cartier Jewelry his topic during the year which he might see or have sent to him" [27, p. 4]. Seven leading figures in librarianship were appointed, including Justin Winsor, William F. Poole, Charles A. Cutter, Samuel S. Green, as well as Frederick B. Perkins of San Francisco Public Library and H. A. Homes, State Librarian of New York. The seventh, and the only woman, was Caroline M. Hewins, who was asked to report on the reading of the young. Hewins was herself a leader; she worked as the director of the Hartford Library (later Hartford Public Library) and was one of the few women library ...
... directors at the time. She had also been the first woman to speak at an ALA conference in 1879, when she had asked a question about the dog tax [28].2 She was an expert on the topic of library service to the young. She had initiated work with children in her library in the late 1870s, where she established a juvenile collection, ran a nature club, and gave summer vacation book talks to young people in Hartford.

As background research for the first Reading of the Young report in 1882, Hewins distributed a simple questionnaire, described in the opening paragraph of this article. In the report itself, Hewins wrote that her conclusions were based on a summary of themes "evident" in the replies she had gathered. Hewins concluded with a set of seven numbered points that Pandora Jewelry she humbly described as "the conclusions to which these opinions, from libraries and schools in ten different states, lead us" [1, pp. 189-90]. Why would Hewins have chosen to send out a letter and gather information from colleagues rather than present her opinions as an expert The six men selected to compose and deliver the 1882 ALA reports did not do comparable research. Although the chairmen were asked to "preserve" all they might "see or have sent to him" in preparation for these section reports, no one else followed the procedure of surveying his colleagues [27, p. 4]. All of these librarians could have been aware of the survey methods used for Poole's 1879 article, and all were almost certainly aware of the 1876 U.S. Bureau of Education report on public libraries and the statistical evidence compiled therein. There are several possible explanations for Hewins's choice, which include (1) the influence of the emerging field of social work, and (2) the need for women to express themselves with great care in order to resist gender stereotypes and thereby be taken seriously by the professional male majority as colleagues.

Hewins may have been influenced by women in the settlement house movement, precursors to professional social workers, another feminized profession. Those early social workers engaged in social inquiry by distributing questionnaires and mapping local neighborhoods by ethnicity and impoverishment. They used these methods to document conditions in the neighborhoods where they chose to reside and locate their work as socially necessary. Florence Kelley, Jane Addams, and other settlement house leaders used survey methods to create their collected Hull House Maps and Papers, published in 1895 [29]. Kelley, who would later become a leader at the Hull House social settlement alongside Addams, wrote an article in 1882 arguing that women needed to "work as social scientists" to support the "humane interests" of social reform work [30, pp. 111-12]. Kelley saw women as capable of and even unusually well suited to contribute to a broad understanding of social problems.