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Authors: Jill Lepore
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the body politic as female.
“To Us the whole Theatre of the World is now open,” Harvey had written, during the age of discovery. ForStanley Kubrick, it wasn’t inner space but outer space that his
Discovery
explored, a whole new world. But, really, it was the same place, a world without women. In the space age, the secrets of generation were at last discovered, in a galaxy terribly far away.
[ CHAPTER 3 ]
The Children’s Room
A nne Carroll Moore was born long ago but not so far away, in Limerick, Maine, in 1871. She had a horse named Pocahontas, a father who read to her from
Aesop’s Fables
, and a grandmother with no small fondness for
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Annie, whose taste ran to
Little Women
, was a reader and a runt. Her seven older brothers called her Shrimp. In 1895, when she was twenty-four, she moved to New York,
where she more or less invented the children’s library. 1
At the time, you had to be fourteen, and a boy, to get into New York’s Astor Library, which opened in 1854, the same year as the Boston Public Library, the country’s first publicly funded city library, where you had to be sixteen. Even if you got inside, the librarians would shush you, carping all the while about how the “young fry” read nothing but “the trashy”: Scott, Cooper, and Dickens. (One century’s garbage being,
as ever, another century’s Great Books.)Samuel Tilden, who, before his death, in 1886, left his $2.4 million fortune to “establish and maintain a free library and reading room in the city of New York,” nearly changed his mind when he found out that 90 percent of the books charged out of the BPL were fiction. Meanwhile,libraries were popping up in American cities and towns like crocuses at first melt. Between 1881
and 1917,Andrew Carnegie underwrote the construction of more than sixteen hundred public libraries in the United States, buildings from which children were routinely turned away on the grounds that they were noisy, messy, and careless but chiefly because they needed to be protected from books, especially novels, which would corrupt their morals. Something had to be done. In 1894, at the annual meeting of theAmerican Library Association,
established in 1876, the Milwaukee Public Library’sLutie Stearns read a “Report on the Reading of the Young.” Stearns wondered, What if age limits were lifted? What if libraries were to set aside special books for children, shelved in separate rooms for children, “staffed by attendants
who liked children
”? 2
In 1896, Moore, who didn’t exactly like children but who did care about them—and who, in any case, needed a job—was given the task of running just such an experiment. The Children’s Library of thePratt Institute in Brooklyn was the first library in the country whose architectural plans included space for children, and this at a time when the Brooklyn schools’ policy stated, “Children below the third grade
do not read well enough to profit from the use of library books.” Moore toured kindergartens—those roomsMilton Bradley was busy supplying with crayons and scissors and paper cutters—and made a list of what she needed for her room: tables and chairs sized for children, not grown-ups; plants, especially ones with flowers; artwork; and very, very good books. 3
The year before Moore started at Pratt, the Astor and Lenox libraries and the Tilden Trust had joined forces to form the New York Public Library. Its cornerstone was laid, at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, in 1902. Four years later, when the library’s directors established the Department of Work with Children, they hired Moore to serve as its superintendent, a position in which she not only oversaw the children’s programs at all of the branch
libraries—including sixty-five paid for by a Carnegie bequest of $5.2 million—but also planned the Central Children’s Room. After the New York Public Library opened its doors, in 1911, its Children’s Room
“To Us the whole Theatre of the World is now open,” Harvey had written, during the age of discovery. ForStanley Kubrick, it wasn’t inner space but outer space that his
Discovery
explored, a whole new world. But, really, it was the same place, a world without women. In the space age, the secrets of generation were at last discovered, in a galaxy terribly far away.
[ CHAPTER 3 ]
The Children’s Room
A nne Carroll Moore was born long ago but not so far away, in Limerick, Maine, in 1871. She had a horse named Pocahontas, a father who read to her from
Aesop’s Fables
, and a grandmother with no small fondness for
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Annie, whose taste ran to
Little Women
, was a reader and a runt. Her seven older brothers called her Shrimp. In 1895, when she was twenty-four, she moved to New York,
where she more or less invented the children’s library. 1
At the time, you had to be fourteen, and a boy, to get into New York’s Astor Library, which opened in 1854, the same year as the Boston Public Library, the country’s first publicly funded city library, where you had to be sixteen. Even if you got inside, the librarians would shush you, carping all the while about how the “young fry” read nothing but “the trashy”: Scott, Cooper, and Dickens. (One century’s garbage being,
as ever, another century’s Great Books.)Samuel Tilden, who, before his death, in 1886, left his $2.4 million fortune to “establish and maintain a free library and reading room in the city of New York,” nearly changed his mind when he found out that 90 percent of the books charged out of the BPL were fiction. Meanwhile,libraries were popping up in American cities and towns like crocuses at first melt. Between 1881
and 1917,Andrew Carnegie underwrote the construction of more than sixteen hundred public libraries in the United States, buildings from which children were routinely turned away on the grounds that they were noisy, messy, and careless but chiefly because they needed to be protected from books, especially novels, which would corrupt their morals. Something had to be done. In 1894, at the annual meeting of theAmerican Library Association,
established in 1876, the Milwaukee Public Library’sLutie Stearns read a “Report on the Reading of the Young.” Stearns wondered, What if age limits were lifted? What if libraries were to set aside special books for children, shelved in separate rooms for children, “staffed by attendants
who liked children
”? 2
In 1896, Moore, who didn’t exactly like children but who did care about them—and who, in any case, needed a job—was given the task of running just such an experiment. The Children’s Library of thePratt Institute in Brooklyn was the first library in the country whose architectural plans included space for children, and this at a time when the Brooklyn schools’ policy stated, “Children below the third grade
do not read well enough to profit from the use of library books.” Moore toured kindergartens—those roomsMilton Bradley was busy supplying with crayons and scissors and paper cutters—and made a list of what she needed for her room: tables and chairs sized for children, not grown-ups; plants, especially ones with flowers; artwork; and very, very good books. 3
The year before Moore started at Pratt, the Astor and Lenox libraries and the Tilden Trust had joined forces to form the New York Public Library. Its cornerstone was laid, at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, in 1902. Four years later, when the library’s directors established the Department of Work with Children, they hired Moore to serve as its superintendent, a position in which she not only oversaw the children’s programs at all of the branch
libraries—including sixty-five paid for by a Carnegie bequest of $5.2 million—but also planned the Central Children’s Room. After the New York Public Library opened its doors, in 1911, its Children’s Room
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