"Lutie Stearns" by Christine Pawley

This article was so refreshing! Finally, Pawley provides a work that was a detailed account of libraries outside of the eastern seaboard. I loved how, in an historian fashion, she ties in details of larger movements like the Progressive movement to explain the motivations and atmosphere of the creation of the WFLC and Lutie Stearns’ career. I thought that grounding a work on a decentralized idea, the traveling library, on a very centralized figurehead was a wise idea in writing this history as well.

In another sense, this article was also extremely refreshing in that the main player was not a Protestant easterner, but a progressive “radical” and a feminist. She railed against things that even other feminists and progressives would not touch, such as racial prejudice. Though sometimes writers project modern terms and beliefs onto those they study, it seems abundantly clear that Stearns had no trouble labeling herself, and that was one thing that really caught my attention. Also, details about her cheekiness, such as the authorship of a pamphlet entitled, “Books of interest and consolation to spinsters” added greatly early on to endear me to the character of Lutie Stearns.

I definitely appreciated the time Pawley spent explaining the “profound” rural isolation that Stearns was combating. In some ways I definitely think that urban/rural divide has grown even greater regarding literature and written knowledge, simply as an instinctive reaction on the rural populations’ part to exposure to urban ideals. I certainly experienced that on a daily basis growing outside a small college town that was surrounded by miles of rural farms.

The discussion during the period about foreign language books struck me as really quite interesting in the rural setting. The idea of catering to the audience of immigrant rural farmers and the like apparently was not automatic strikes me as so typical of an out of touch administrative web of librarians. Thinking more personally, I know that my German and Czech farmer ancestors probably had little time for anything outside the farm, and when they did have free time, they wouldn’t have wanted to struggle with a new language but relax with something familiar. Ignoring something as intuitive as serving your audience for some reason is a recurring theme in library history, and providing foreign language books is but one interesting example.