Interior Landscapes: Personal Perspectives on Professional Lives: The First Generation of Librarians at the Illinois Library School, 1893-1907

From 1893 to 1907, 361 students comprised the first classes entering the Illinois Library School when Katharine Lucinda Sharp was director. Three hundred and forty-nine of these students were women. As the first generation of college-educated women seeking a career in the Progressive Era, they faced many personal pressures while obtaining their library training and establishing their careers. Although these women were committed to their new profession, societal and personal pressures often made achievement difficult. Among these pressures were family obligations, marriage, physical and mental health, and extenuating financial circumstances, which often forced them to abandon school plans, change jobs, or re-enter the job market after a long absence. These women also had few professional female models as they forged their careers, having to learn how to live on their own and manage their own financial resources in a job that often involved geographic isolation and long hours. With the model of the library school director, Katharine Sharp, and the ongoing support of Illinois Library School faculty, they confronted obstacles of advancing within a man's world and asserting themselves with university administrators or members of library boards. Based on the evidence of archival sources at the University of Illinois Archives, this collective biography traces the lives of the women, examining the effect of personal issues on their professional lives from library school to death. It finds that the women did manage to assert themselves and go beyond the expectations and limitations of their background, persevering and committing themselves to a profession newly opened to women.