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Canada 150: Library work as a profession for women

B. Mabel Dunham (1881-1957) was the president of the Ontario Library Association in 1920. In her presidential address, she spoke bluntly about the opportunities that library work offered to women in the 1920s and the risks of the profession, calling library work “a profession by courtesy only.”

In this interview with local reporter Ernest Fletcher, Miss Dunham shares some of the highlights of this address.

Canada 150 Library work as a professsion for Canadian women transcript

References
B. Mabel Dunham, “Library Work as a Profession for Canadian Women,” 2, (OLA Presidential Address), Ontario Library Association fonds, MV 2246, F1195, Archives of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario.

Music
Happy Together by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike License.

Photo
B. Mabel Dunham. Canada’s Early Women Writers. SFU Library Digital Collections. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. 1980-2014.This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

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