Feminists Among Us: Resistance and Advocacy in Library Leadership

Just because librarians have been classed as feminized professionals does not mean that feminist theory or praxis exists on the job. That's a main premise of Feminists Among Us: Resistance and Advocacy in Library Leadership, published as part of the Series on Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies, which focuses on critical information theory. With its emphasis on exploring leadership from a variety of social intersections and identities, Feminists Among Us could sit in conversation with the work of librarian and feminist theorist Audre Lorde—notably Sister Outsider (Crossing Press, 2007)—activist historian Howard Zinn's 1977 address to the Society of American Archivists, “Secrecy, Archives and the Public Interest,” and EBSCO engineer Eric Frierson's article “Leading with Heart” published by the open-access journal In the Library with the Lead Pipe (August 2011). These are all works that essentially ask us to question or reject false ideas of neutrality, embrace authenticity, and speak out against oppression of all kinds.

Feminists Among Us is a slim collection of nine essays, case studies, and interviews written by an incredibly diverse group of women in managerial or leadership positions within the library profession. The book has the distinction of being edited by two library managers of color: Shirley Lew, library technology manager at Vancouver Community College, and Baharak Yousefi, head of Library Communications at Simon Fraser University, also in Vancouver. The collection is unique in that it highlights feminist theory as practiced by managers and names specific acts as feminist, which allows readers to see themselves as operating within an intentional feminist framework. But the book also interrogates the ways we fail to do so in our institutions and provides a path toward moving forward to be better.

Leadership is a broad umbrella under which to direct this conversation. People considered “leaders” in the library and archival professions—leader defined for the purposes of this review as one with the power to shape policy, conversation, or consensus for and with a wide group of people—are not necessarily people in supervisory roles; while the two can be and are often mutually exclusive, both power structures need and deserve equal analysis. As many of the chapters make clear, particularly the chapter by Yousefi titled “On the Disparity between What We Say and What We Do in Libraries,” these roles and goals are often at odds with each other because our stated values as information professionals are frequently out of line with administrative or institutional priorities that uphold a status quo of sexist, racist, or ableist behavior. “We decline opportunities to host forums on democracy and citizen engagement. We choose library vendors that do not align with our stated goals and principles. We claim intellectual freedom as a core value but silence professional dissent within our own ranks. And—disturbingly—we seem to get away with it with few or no repercussions” (p. 92), Yousefi writes.

No doubt this collection of essays would be useful, even necessary, for managers or leaders within the archival profession, for it contains a great deal of insight on applying an intersectionality-based feminist framework to day-to-day tasks, archival processes, and strategic plans—and even on where to begin—but the compilation suffers from not actively engaging archivists in this conversation. The archival profession is currently struggling with a labor paradigm that could use a feminist ethic of care to uplift it. By not including archivists as contributors (which may have been unintentional if no archivists or special collections staff submitted manuscripts), we miss the issue of work precarity based on grant funding—a situation that disproportionately and negatively affects archivists of color, archivists not of upper-middle-class backgrounds, archivists with caregiving responsibilities, and archivists with disabilities.

Being a manager or leader is essentially about organizing the labor force to accomplish tasks, ideally those united by a larger vision in line with the values we profess to uphold. Conversations around work precarity are tied to feminist theory and work precarity is an immediate problem that our profession must solve if we hope to be in any way effective stewards of cultural history now and in the future. Archivists benefit from scholarship that interrogates with an explicitly feminist framework the inherently colonialist mindset that permeates our appraisal, description, arrangement, and outreach practices, and ultimately our labor practices.

Despite the missing archival perspective, the book gives crucial insight on how to advocate for feminist pedagogy and praxis with library administrators. The chapter especially resonant to me as someone who has collaborated with IT staff on migrating institutional repositories is “One Library, Two Cultures” by Dale and Jennifer Askey, which discusses the need for reimagining the dichotomy between library and IT staff, and posits that, to change things, we need to lean in to a nonneutral viewpoint around knowledge creation (p. 138). One of the things they recommend is to “question how we are including each other in our decision-making processes” (p. 144), for example, including para-professional or access/circulation staff and technicians (which might include archives or cataloging technicians), who are not always party to conversations about the technology used in the library. They also recommend centering people and communities in discussions about technology instead of wrapping those discussions in dense jargon.

We need to also acknowledge biases where they exist, including within ourselves, as Rachel Fleming and Kelly McBride point out in their chapter “How We Speak, How We Think, What We Do: Leading Intersectional Feminist Conversations in Libraries” on starting hard conversations around equality (p. 107) and working to learn more about each other through meaningful interaction. What would meaningful interaction look like in our archival repositories at the leadership level? It might look like reprioritizing acquisitions to match staffing levels. It might look like making room for staff of color to discuss their technical experience and not just force them to explain diversity issues. It might look like spreading out the office housekeeping tasks, such as note-taking at meetings or sending thank-you notes to donors, to make sure that male employees share those responsibilities. It would also look like integrating tech responsibilities into everyone's workflow to decrease silos and also create a pipeline for underrepresented staff into different aspects of library service.

Feminists Among Us is must-read for anyone in the profession, regardless of interest in management or leadership positions. For those who are, the book offers a strong framework around which to build strategic vision and planning in an organization. For those who are not, it offers a blueprint and suggestions for advocacy to create more equitable workplaces. It could be an important work of critical theory for newer archivists, especially those interested in disrupting organizational labor models that do not serve our archives or larger communities. The collected essays ask that we all work very hard to unlearn the harmful practices that have shaped our relationships to power as it exists within the profession. Communicate with each other more, but also listen and make room for mistakes and personal and institutional growth.