Mary Cutler Fairchild

Mary Salome Cutler Fairchild (née Mary Salome Cutler; June 21, 1855 – December 20, 1921) was a pioneering American librarian, educator, and school administrator. She is known for her contributions to the establishment of library science in the United States through her work at the Columbia College library and New York State Library School, as well as her service in the American Library Association.

Life and career Mary Salome Cutler was born in Dalton, Massachusetts, to Lydia Wakefield and Artemas Hubbard Cutler, a papermaker. She graduated from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in 1875, then taught Latin at her alma mater from 1876 to 1878.

After ill health forced her to stop teaching, she began to pursue librarianship, as she was intrigued by the work of the newly-organized American Library Association (founded in 1876). In 1884, she worked at a small country library, after which she contacted Melvil Dewey, then-librarian of Columbia College, about library-related employment. Dewey hired her as a cataloger, and she became head cataloger of the Columbia library in 1885. In 1887, Dewey opened the Columbia College School of Library Economy, the first librarian training institution in the United States, and hand-selected Cutler as a cataloging instructor. Two years later, Dewey resigned from Columbia to work as the director of the New York State Library, and he moved the School of Library Economy to Albany, New York, as officials at the all-male Columbia chafed at the admission of women to the library school. Cutler "sympathized with Dewey's vision of librarianship" Additionally, she pioneered library services for the blind, in memory of her blind father, by organizing the New York State Library for the Blind. In 1891, Cutler was awarded a bachelor's degree in library science by the University of the State of New York.

She was the Executive Director of the American Library Association (ALA) in 1891, a member of the ALA's Council from 1892 to 1898 and from 1909 to 1914, and ALA vice president from 1894 to 1895 and from 1900 to 1901. As an exhibit committee chair for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, she established and compiled a catalog for a model library with 5,000 volumes. Cutler married Edwin M. Fairchild, a Unitarian Minister, in 1897.

After falling ill in 1905, Cutler Fairchild had to retire from the library for the blind and the library school. By the time of her retirement, she had trained around 500 students in librarianship. Cutler Fairchild credits the open-minded attitude of the men in the library movement for contributing to the lack of self-consciousness displayed by women in association meetings by taking what women said or wrote at its actual value. However, she noted that participation by women in American Library Association meetings was disproportionate to their attendance. Cutler Fairchild continued her evaluation of women in libraries by surveying 100 representative libraries to access the number of professional and non-professional positions and their salaries held by women as compared to those held by men. The results of her inquiries proved that women greatly outnumbered men in the libraries selected, holding a large proportion of administrative positions but with little administrative responsibility, and outnumbered men in non-administrative responsible positions, but seldom held positions with the most responsibility. In addition, women did not hold positions offering the highest salaries, but rather appeared to perform the same level of work for less compensation. The following reasons were given for this discrepancy:

She [that is, women in general] has not the temperamental fitness for the exercise of large authoritative control over a mixed staff. She is not in touch with the world of affairs. She is distinctly unbusinesslike. She shuns rather than courts responsibility. She is conservative and afraid of legitimate experiments. She lacks originality. She lacks a sense of proportion and the power of taking a large, imperative view of things.

Despite these criticisms of women's ability to hold responsible library positions, women continued to push men out of the library field, just as in the teaching field, because they could be paid less than men, as was legal at the time.

Cutler Fairchild did find agreement among the criticizers that positions requiring "gracious hospitality" were held more successfully by women including the head of small or medium-sized libraries and all work with children. "'Her broad sympathies, her quick wits, her intuitions and her delight in self-sacrifice' give her an undoubted advantage."