Month: September 2007

mudflap woman

There’s nothing to rouse one’s ire quite like having one’s home insulted. That home can be your country, your team, or your family, and in its worst forms, that ire is what leads to nationalism, gang warfare, and brawls at soccer matches. Most of the time, however, the stakes are more subtle, and the feeling is worth exploring.

As most of you know, I live and work in Wyoming. Ire was my initial reaction to the so-called mudflap girl flap. Fine, I thought, the image may be sexist, but do you have to dump that all on Wyoming? Wyoming, like 49 other states in the nation, has its share of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism. It’s sort of weird to see the names of your state library officials next to an exhortation to tell them to pull material from the public eye.

Wyoming has its problems, and I won’t deny them. Most notably, we worst in the nation when it comes to discrepancy in pay between men and women.

I know that for some people these things are all of a piece: sexual image of woman –> objectification of women –> paying women poorly. There are, I am sure, connections. I spend quite a bit of time trying to explain to people that if you say men, you say women, not girls; if you say ladies, you say gentlemen. Only if you say boys do you then say girls. (I’d also kind of like it if we started talking about female doctors and writers and presidents–have you ever head anyone say, “Oh, he’s a man doctor?” No? I thought not. Ever taken a course called American Men Writers? Well, you probably have, but not under that title. Woman writers aren’t special; they are writers who are female, not some rare breed of being that require double nouns.)

Many commentators (including our first lady) have said that the way to create pay equity between men and women in Wyoming is to get more women working in the oil and gas industries. (To give you an idea of how lucrative these fields are during boomtimes, I’ve met high school dropouts who make twice what I do with two masters degrees.) That approach would work statistically, but it’s not a solution. The solution is to value the work that women do and pay people who are teachers and childcare providers and nurses and–yes–librarians in a fashion that is equal to the services they provide. The solution is to make sure that all full-time jobs pay a living wage, so that women are not stuck in minimum wage service jobs.

Those solutions probably also include learning to see women in a variety of ways, not simply as objects adorning mudflaps or library marketing posters. But discussing objectification is the easy part. We can write all the blog entries we want, but I don’t think that any number of blog posts is going to get a living wage bill passed.

I had many far more strident and far more obnoxious things to say about people’s reactions to the campaign, but quite frankly, I’m tired. I appreciate the variety of opinions I’ve seen, many of which have affected the way I think about the issue. But I’m tired. I’m tired of discussions about whether my bumper sticker (a similar mudflap woman from Arches Book Company in Moab, UT) is helping or harming the cause of equal rights. I’m tired of other people having similar arguments. I’m tired of being told what I should or should not think as a feminist. I’m tired of talking about empowerment. I’m tired of defending my state and the people in it.

I’m ready for an actual fight.

when does a book become too old-fashioned?

As many of you know, I work at a joint school/public library. Although I am not actually a school librarian (though I have taken some education classes, which were enough to convince me I didn’t want to be a teacher), I try my best to balance those two duties. My co-worker, who is paid partly by the school, handles all the school money, but since we’re both there all the time, it’s not as though one of us is all school and the other all public.

This year I’ve been pushing to get into classrooms and to get classes into the library to learn about how to use the library. Since all of Wyoming’s community colleges are a part of the WYLD network, it’s advantageous for students to learn a little about the catalog now, even if it seems beside the point in a library as small as ours. I’ve gone to talk to the 8th grade studies skills class once, and they’ve come to the library for a sort of OPAC scavenger hunt. Next I’m going to talk to them a bit about looking for good information on the web. As soon as their SmartBoard gets fixed, I’m going to go visit the 5th grade. And on Friday, the 6th grade teacher stopped by to ask if there was any possibility I might be interested in doing some book talks. “Would I ever!!!” I said. (After all, I am one of those people who became a librarian in part because I love to read. I did three mini-booktalks during my 15 minute presentation to the faculty this year, and I think that was a good idea.)

And so now I am thinking about what books I want to talk about. I’ll do some new ones, of course, but as the new ones are more prominently displayed, I’d like to look as well at some older books, things that may have gotten lost in the stacks, even in our tiny library, which has about 25,000 items all told. I have therefore been thinking some about the books I read when I was that age. Some seem like shoo-ins for inclusion, like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (which I haven’t read since I was 12 or 13, but I’m happy to be reacquainted with it) and Ender’s Game, which I didn’t discover until graduate school but would have gobbled up had I run across it earlier–and sticking with the fantasy/SF theme, I do wish we had a copy of Max and Me and the Time Machine–I may just have to go out and acquire one). Others are good possibilities: The Root Cellar is historical fiction, but it part of it is set in the present, so it has some appeal for people who don’t want to be plunged entirely in the past.

But many of the books I read when I was in grade school are a bit more problematic. I was an inveterate reader of old books. Partly that was because my mother and grandmother gave me so many of them, and partly it was because the new books at my school were always checked out, and I was too timid to ask how to get on the waiting list. In fact, there’s a Jill Paton Walsh book that was booktalked at the beginning of one year that I have yet to read.

So I raided the stacks. It became a kind of game with me to find books that hadn’t been checked out in ten or twenty years. My mother found Quest in the Desert for me one day in fourth grade when she was visiting for some parent function. That was 1984 or 1985, and its last checkout had been in 1972. (It’s a great book, but not a good one to read before you eat–it concerns a naturalist’s trip through Mongolia, and includes descriptions of the things he was given to eat, such as sheep’s eyeballs. We had silent reading right before lunch that year, and it’s a wonder I ate as much of the school lunch as I did.)

I read anything by Louisa May Alcott that I could get my hands on, and some–An Old-Fashioned Girl, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom (which surely must be owned by more than two WorldCat libraries, but I’m too lazy to sort through pages of results)–I’ve read more times than I care to admit. At one point I decided I was going to read all of the Newbery award winners, and I found wonders like The Trumpeter of Krakow and real clunkers like Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, which I don’t think I ever finished. My mother read The Wheel on the School to me when I was in first or second grade, and I found more by DeJong later, though sadly none were as good. I found a clutch of early Andre Norton fantasy books one day, and my mother grabbed Have Space Suit, Will Travel from amidst the Heinleins (with firm instructions not to read any more recent Heinlein titles).

We have some of these books in our library, and I may even try to pull a few. Other books that I read then we don’t have, and I must admit a certain sense of relief. I adored the Little Colonel books, which concern the child and young adulthood of a girl growing up on a plantation in the early twentieth century, but I would have some trepidation about them sitting on a shelf. My mother gave the first one to me and said, quite sternly, that while I could read these books, there were certain things I needed to understand. “For one thing,” she said, “we do not call people ‘darkies.'” (I regret that she gave me no similar warnings about the author’s portrayal of romance; the last book in the series is The Little Colonel’s Knight Comes Riding, which should give you some idea.)

Of course, “I absolutely love this book!” is never a good way to begin a booktalk, and I long since resigned myself to the idea that books that I like are not necessarily going to be the ones that other people like, and vice versa. But I wonder also about how long a book can be viable. I started rereading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy this weekend, and while I find it as entertaining as ever (even more so, in some instances, as I get more of it), I wonder if it won’t seem peculiar and antiquated to the “Millennial” generation we’re supposed to view as new and different. I get a little sick of reading about how this generation is unlike any one that has come before, but at the same time, there may be some point to it. Can kids who would find my TI-81 graphic calculator ancient really relate to early Heinlein novels, where people are forever pulling slide rules out of their pockets? Garfield books are as popular as they were when I was in grade school, but I don’t imagine that the Bloom County books we inhaled in sixth grade would have much meaning to people who weren’t even born when Reagan was president.

Backlist is a big what makes libraries valuable: we have books you can’t find anywhere else (or couldn’t before the age of the internet). I’m never going to get ride of all the old books in the library, but I do find myself wondering how I can make them remain vital–make them come to be as real as the Velveteen Rabbit.

Post Script:

Apparently I am not the world’s only fan of the Little Colonel–that shouldn’t be surprising, but I never cease to be amazed by the internet.