This page was created by Anonymous.  The last update was by Natalie K Meyers.

A Genealogy of Refusal : Walking away from crisis and scarcity narratives

Why don't librarians "Just say No"?

In this page we begin to explore why the librarian stays silent, why the word "No" never seemed to make its way into the vocabulary of librarians, and why sometimes, it is difficult for librarians even to say:  "I prefer not to."

We started this page laughing about anti-drug campaigns (DARE and "Just say No") and then found ourselves returning to a circumstance that will not shock anyone who has ever worked in a library:  Libraries [& librarians] are often complicit in their own silence,  organizationally so desperate to prove their worth, that refusal is not an option.

Morgenstern's Starless Sea takes things quite a bit further. Reviewers describe the book as a beautifully written and compellingly imagined book that introduces a mystical library. These librarians  are physically and emotionally inculcated to their vocation, devoting themselves entirely to serving the library.  


The librarians will be blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs and then either be branded or de-tongued before they can start work. The mutilations are the critical prerequisites that mark the point at which the librarians in the Starless Sea can be trusted to do their jobs.

Why elinguation? Because, borrowing from Popowich, their role is to be caretakers who can't say "No" ? Not meaning makers? (2019)



Library work, like nursing, cleaning, caregiving, early childhood education, and social work is a profession where efforts tend to be performed by feminised labor. Labor that always says "Yes" when faced with human need.

There's a parodied librarian stereotype evident in  the Bookmobile Bad Girl and the Reference Tramp. These caricatures of librarians who enact their role by always answering the call (with a "Yes") They are the ones who "give it away all over town." Along with Morgenstern's acolytes  they occupy the far end of the bell curve in our workplace refusal kinship diagram. Men populate the other side of the curve when we look at how workplace refusal is gendered. Men in music, like Todd Rundgren have literally made a fortune celebrating refusal. Male characters like Peter Gibbons in  OfficeSpace  foment rebellion and bond over it with co-workers. Other male characters like Dante and Randal in Clerks simply revel in turning up but preferring not to work.

When academic librarians seek to prove themselves and create externally recognizable value, whether through the credential of the MLS, or through determining which achievements will be acknowledged by faculty appointment and promotion committees,  we similarly distance ourselves from the service/maintainer and feminized side of the profession. We re-define our role to align more with the masculine to prove our worth alongside our other colleagues in the patriarchal world of the ivory tower.  As argued by Seale and Mirza (2019):

the actual work involved in academic librarianship is frequently invisibilized. This invisibility is only emphasized by the fact that much of that work entails emotional labor or maintenance. ... Academic librarianship’s erasure of feminized forms of labor and the field’s “inherent femaleness” is inextricable from its search for markers of professionalization outside of librarianship, in the form of non-MLS degrees, more appealing domains of knowledge, and nonfeminized types of labor. (258-259)


Why would we do this? "Isn't the academy becoming a more welcming place for women?"  you might ask.  "Aren't half the students we serve women?"  In terms of gender balance in the professorial ranks, particularly in the United States, in the most recent American Association of University Professors' salary survey we find that  religious institutions have finally got their gendered salary gaps down to a single digit percentage(AAUP, 2021).  That's good news. But the survey data also show there's still an 86.8 percent difference between number or men and women serving as full professors at private-independents(AAUP, 2021).

Writ large we can imagine this imbalance if we picture a woman going up for faculty appointment or  promotion. When the time comes for her to convince decision makers that what she does is worthwhile, only  16% of those people are likely to identify with her at the most basic level of having experienced gendered labor like she has.   Things aren't likely to get better any time soon in the US either, as long as that will cost money.  This past year "The survey found that real wages for full-time faculty decreased for the first time since the Great Recession, and average wage growth for all ranks of full-time faculty was the lowest since the AAUP began tracking annual wage growth in 1972. After adjusting for inflation, real wages decreased at over two-thirds of colleges and universities. The number of full-time faculty decreased at over half of institutions(AAUP, 2021)."

This patriarchal organization with its sliding wages and hyper-competitive employment situation is the one in which academic librarians work and are compensated.  Another further tension within academic librarianship that can exacerbate pay gendered pay gaps is the one that differentiates between the effort value of those who are seen as innovators (often gendered as: masculine) and those that are seen as maintainers (often gendered as: feminine).  Popowhich explores this tension, observing that :

Librarianship—like the world itself—is full of contradictions or antinomies, tensions, productive or causal, non-static dichotomies, dialectical “unities of opposites,” such as that between enlightenment and social control, between concrete library work and the more intellectual labor of library science, or between men’s and women’s work, the center and the periphery, etc. (Popowich, 2019)

In this situation how do you justify yourself, your cost, your service? How do you hang on to your part of the pie  when you're really working in the doughnut hole? 

The situation has improved some since Mary aka The Party Girl got fired from her job at the public library back in '95, but not all that much.  Mary's godmother, the librarian, tells her "Melvyl Dewey hired women as librarians because he believed the job didn't require any intelligence. It was a woman's job . .  . That means its underpaid and undervalued."  (Mayer 1995)


This scarcity scenario is playing out at Universities worldwide, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic situation which can drive counter-intuitive decision making. 

For example, some Libraries unnecessarily delayed closing during the COVID-19 pandemic, as other academic libraries closed to protect their patrons and their staff (Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe and Christine Wolff-Eisenberg, 2020).  The rationale for those that remained opened was that somehow that the librarians were up for the risk, and that their sacrifice was worth it.  
Amidst all these decision points, most libraries eventually closed til mitigations were sufficient to provide a modicum of safety. Among closed libraries the majority were circumspect in how they announced it. Hundreds of libraries were closed, yet text mining their closure websites revealed that only eleven actually came right out and said "We are Closed" (Meyers et al, 2020)  Instead, libraries and librarians that closed their doors to patrons emphasized what they could still  "do" seeming to avoid at all costs using the phrase "We are closed" even thought that's probably what most patrons were coming to their websites to find out.

There is, of course, no single reason librarians (and Libraries), don't "Just say No." But it is worth remembering that even Bartleby in all his mental anguish was able to voice that he "preferred not to"-- surely this is a language we could adopt more?

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