Although women had been employed in libraries previously, the six young women hired by Melvil Dewey in 1883 to work at Columbia College library captured the imagination of 20th-century library historians as groundbreaking fore-mothers of female employment and/or the beginnings of low-paid exploitation of women in the library workforce, but never as six young individuals at the beginning of six full lives.

Before women were allowed to vote in U.S. elections, the American Library Association (ALA) found its leadership in Theresa West Elmendorf. In 1911, more than 30 years after the founding of ALA, Elmendorf was elected the first female president of the Association.

On May 14, 1969, Carrie Coleman Robinson, a Black school librarian in Alabama, brought a landmark case to the US District Court. After being passed over for a promotion, Robinson sued Alabama’s Department of Education alleging that she had been denied equal protection as a department employee because of her race. Robinson’s case, and long career as a librarian, reveals much about the Jim Crow South and librarianship in the civil rights era.

The Woman’s Building and its library at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago stood as shining examples of what women could accomplish.

The Woman’s Building Library at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition achieved a milestone and was an impressive harbinger for the intersection of librarianship, women’s history, community service, public policy, and international relations. And it was only the beginning.

The 1960s and 1970s were a time of great societal change in the U.S., and especially so for women. The rebirth of feminism led to a greater desire to invest in a thorough examination of women and their erasure within the historical canon. These ideals spread to librarianship and ALA, where the Feminist Task Force was established in 1970, Women Library Workers in 1975, and the creation of the ALA Committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship in 1976.