Congratulations to Emma Cooling from University College Dublin, whose blog post was awarded 3rd place in the A&SL Blog Post Competition 2026.
The competition invited library staff and LIS students based in Ireland to submit a blog post exploring how library staff, libraries and information work are portrayed across film, television, literature, art, social media, gaming, news media or other cultural formats.
In an age where we are faced daily with existential threats – climate change, war, unchecked technological advancement – we have somehow crucially neglected one grave threat to our delicate society: librarians. Specifically, lady librarians. What on earth do you do with an intelligent, independent woman who serves as a steward of knowledge? What box can you possibly place her in that makes you feel safe and warm in your bed, no longer worried about the concept of a woman with as much autonomy, knowledge and complex personhood as any man?
Mainstream media has, in my experience, provided two possible solutions: make them infertile, or make them sexy.
On the infertile side of things, you have the spinster librarian; they are “the most stereotypical female librarian image” (Snoek-Brown, 2011), often portrayed as “old maids”. These women are sexually repressed, bitter, and stern with little fashion sense – we are all familiar with this image. So familiar that when I started pursuing my MLIS, the most common jokes I was met with by family members were: “have you started your ugly cardigan collection yet?”, “you better start practising your shushing/death stare combo”, and “but you don’t even like cats!” (for my cat lovers, I do now like cats, for non-librarian-related reasons of course).
This woman is not just a media stereotype, but serves as a cautionary tale to women everywhere. We see this nowhere better than in the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946). For those unfamiliar with the film, it centres around the character of George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), a man whose dreams were neglected for the sake of helping those in his family and community. Facing regret and suicidal thoughts, George is then shown by a guardian angel what his community and family would look like had he never been born: his hometown is scourged by poverty, seedy institutions and crime, his brother is dead, and, to his shock and horror, his wife is a single librarian.
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| Figure 1: Snoek-Brown, J. (2011, September 21). Mary as the Spinster Librarian in the second half of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (1946). REEL Librarians. https://reel-librarians.com/2011/09/21/its-a-wonderful-stereo |
This shocking revelation would surely spur any man to appreciate the life he has (which George promptly does), and this reveals a deep-seeded fear about the library profession. Having been historically dominated by women, with 90% of librarians being female in the 1930s (Keer & Carlos, 2015), the story remains much the same today, with female librarians making up around 80% of the library workforce (Greenshields, 2023). The librarian profession is not only literally dominated by women, but also consistently gendered as female in public imagination (Singh et al., 2020).
Why is a female-dominated, female-associated profession so terrifying to a society which relies on women’s submission and domestic work? The issue is two-pronged: female professionals have more money and independence, and female librarians in particular have specialised knowledge and are guardians of knowledge. Why would they need to marry, have children, or rely on anyone else? This is without mentioning the fact that, if men are superior, then a job associated with women must be made to look inferior.
So: spinster-dom. Portray these qualified professionals as lonely old maids with no partners or families, make their authority seem more like a bitter bid for control in a life of singledom that surely no woman would choose.
But what about the opposing alternative, the sexy librarian?
The sexy librarian is enticing, “flirtatious” and “sexually charged” (Snoek-Brown, 2011). She either wears sexually suggestive outfits juxtaposed by glasses and a high bun, or is transformed from spinster to sexy when leaving the library and “let[ting] her hair down” (Snoek-Brown, 2011). Like the spinster caricature, we can see this stereotype across various media. One search on Pinterest reveals the popularity of the genre of character:
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| Figure 2: Pinterest search results page for "sexy librarian". Screenshot by author, 26 August 2026. |
The sexy librarian, though standing in opposition to everything the spinster librarian seems to represent, falls under the same boot and suffers the same fate. Though being sexually desirable and virile can, in a man, coexist with power, status, and respect, the same is not afforded to women. Being perceived as sexy often, through no fault of a woman’s own, reduces her to a body; very often, a body without a mind. Look, we’ve devalued the library profession in yet another way!
Any rational being would have the nuance to recognise that there is nothing inherently wrong with being indefinitely single or with being sexually active. But, unfortunately, media reflects the prejudices of the status quo back to us, and the portrayal of women librarians in media being split so often into these two camps reveals a fear and mistrust of women’s autonomy via the library profession. This fear and mistrust leads to a devaluing of the profession and the women involved in it by leaning into conservative fears: unmarried, childless, independent women and women who are unashamedly sexual.
In a time when this still-female-dominated profession is under fire from fascist governments and anti-intellectual politics, it has never been more important to examine the media biases that teach us: this isn’t important work if women do it. Because, really, the work has never been more important.
This isn’t just about librarianship as a profession, either; uplifting female professionals and undoing these harmful stereotypes in an age of manospheres and tradwives is an act of resistance on behalf of women everywhere.
In a time when this still-female-dominated profession is under fire from fascist governments and anti-intellectual politics, it has never been more important to examine the media biases that teach us: this isn’t important work if women do it. Because, really, the work has never been more important.
This isn’t just about librarianship as a profession, either; uplifting female professionals and undoing these harmful stereotypes in an age of manospheres and tradwives is an act of resistance on behalf of women everywhere.
Reference List
Capra, F. (Director). (1946). It's a Wonderful Life [Film].
Greenshields, M. (2023, March 14). Thinking about librarianship & women. EUI Blogs. https://blogs.eui.eu/library/thinking-about-librarianship-women
Keer, G., & Carlos, A. (2015, October 30). The stereotype stereotype. American Libraries Magazine. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2015/10/30/the-stereotype-stereotype/
Singh, V. K., Chayko, M., Inamdar, R., & Floegel, D. (2020). Female librarians and male computer programmers? Gender bias in occupational images on digital media platforms. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 71(11), 1281–1294. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24335
Snoek-Brown, J. (2011, September 14). Character types. REEL Librarians. https://reel-librarians.com/rolecall/charactertypes/
Emma Cooling is a soon-to-be graduate of University College Dublin’s Masters of Library and Information Science.
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