Historical studies to date on the employment of women in librarianship have focused overwhelmingly on the public library sector. However, after the First World War, a different kind of library career also emerged for women in the technical libraries and scientific information bureaux of individual industrial enterprises and co-operative trade and industry research associations. Women's employment experiences in this field were shaped not by the discourses and practices of traditional librarianship, but by those of the industrial sector. Technical library and information work was the only branch of industry to which women science graduates were routinely appointed, but it also attracted a significant number of male recruits. Drawing on a range of sources including company archives, the records of Aslib and the Women's Employment Federation, and contemporary periodical and other literature, this paper explores the status and roles of women engaged in industrial library and information work between 1918 and 1960. It argues that deeply gendered workplace ideology restricted even as it permitted women's employment, but also illuminates how some women scientists were able to seize on this rare opening as a means both of negotiating responsible careers in the overwhelmingly hostile industrial environment and of making influential contributions to the development of the technical library and information field. This paper is based on research undertaken for the AHRB-funded research project 'The early information society in Britain, 1900–1975' in the School of Information Management, Leeds Metropolitan University. Thanks to Alistair Black and David Muddiman for helpful discussions on earlier drafts of this work.
It was generally believed by historians that the increasingly formal regulation of belief and practice in the Society of Friends (Quakers) during the eighteenth century led to a decline in the influence and authority exercised by women in the denomination. Recent research has indicated, however, that although women were denied equal status and roles in the Society's new disciplinary bodies, the period also saw them beginning to outnumber men as the principal upholders of charismatic spiritual leadership through the ministry. These conflicting trends suggest that there were tensions and ambiguities within Quaker discourses on the meaning of gender and its implications for the exercise of religious authority. Using the testimonies of religious experience constructed by women ministers, this paper explores those discourses and illuminates the ways in which they were exploited, questioned and transformed by women. It argues that belief in the equal capacity of men and women for divine service was cut across by the conviction that sexual difference played a crucial part in shaping religious experience. Ministering women negotiated and manipulated the relationship between spirituality and femininity, both to understand themselves as instruments of divine power and to challenge the establishment of a male hierarchy in their church.
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