The women who revolutionized libraries in the midst of the Great War

BarcelonaWhen World War I broke out, a group of women traveled to France to join the American Committee for Devastated Regions (CARD), founded by Anne Morgan (1873–1952), daughter of banker J.P. Morgan. Among these women was the American librarian Jesse Kit Carson (1876–1959), who revolutionized French libraries amidst the devastation of war. Among many other things, she founded five permanent libraries and created fifty mobile libraries in the north. “She refused to be defeated by the French bureaucracy, where many men were entrenched, sexist, and elitist, and she worked to ensure that libraries had children’s literature sections and open-access systems, both unheard of in France at that time,” explains the writer Janet Skeslien Charles (Conrad, 1971). The librarians on the front linesTranslated into Catalan by Mar Vidal and published by Navona.

The author came across Carson's name while researching for her previous book, The Library of Paris“Her name appeared very often in the archives, and I think she hasn’t been treated fairly. There were also many beautiful letters from French women thanking her for her work,” says Skeslien, who emphasizes that Carson completely transformed the French library system. “There is a lot of documentation that shows that at that time libraries weren’t considered places for children. There were university libraries for students, 99% of whom were men, and there were public libraries, but they weren’t very pleasant places. You couldn’t just wander around or look at books,” she explains. At the beginning of the 20th century, in libraries, readers had to request books and wait patiently behind a railing.

A multimillionaire fighting for women’s rights

The women of CARD didn't just revolutionize libraries; they turned ambulances into mobile libraries, created reading clubs, trained the first French librarians, and sent books to soldiers. They went much further, working to help malnourished children. They reopened schools, offered shelter to many families, and helped hundreds of people return to their villages. Much of the funding for all of this came from the numerous campaigns launched by Anne Morgan. She was ridiculed because she was the daughter of a banker who fought for the suffragette movement and women's rights. "It was a way of making her look small," they said. the mink brigade"," the writer explains. In the book, the author brings back many other names, such as Anne Murray Dike. "Everything she wrote is a fascinating account of the organization's challenges and progress," she explains. When Dike died, in the obituary of the New York Times It read: "It was one of the main forces in the reconstruction of the regions of France devastated by the war."

"There were incredible women in the trenches, supporting soldiers and civilians, but they have been made invisible. Peter Jackson directed and produced They shall not grow old (They Will Not Grow Old), with a lot of previously unseen material from the Great War archives. It's a shame that with such a long film, no women appear performing any of these heroic tasks, even though there is a lot of archival footage of them,” says Skeslien, who emphasizes the importance of libraries.

For the author, it's necessary to fight and stand up for them. “I've joined together to combat book banning, I've participated in different fundraising events and fought in court against bans and censorship,” she says. “There are very violent and frightening things on the internet, but it's too vast to combat; it's like an international web that parents can't really access. Instead, they can attack their local librarian, they can physically pick up a book and say, ‘This, this is our problem,’” she laments.