They went from being feared to eagerly awaited. From considering them crazy to saviors. Risking their lives with each ride, women and children from the remote towns of the American Appalachians scrutinized the horizon every day in search of their silhouette. They were the Amazons of books, the librarians on horseback, or the book women, as little by little these women became known who went down in the history of the United States for managing to get the printed letter to the most remote places in the middle of Great Britain. Depression. It was the thirties of the last century. Currently, the pandemic has also given us a great lesson in the importance of books in times of coronavirus. They have not arrived on horseback, but there have been many feats that were carried out to achieve their goal.
Almost a century has passed since the appearance of this group of young women between the ages of 18 and 25 who, on the back of their horses, became the window to the world of many American homes. The Pack Horse Librarians were part of a program created by the United States government under the umbrella of the great Works Progress Administration (WPA) project with which it was intended to alleviate the economic and social ravages derived from the Great Depression of the thirties.
The librarian program ran from 1936 to 1943 and its goal was to bring reading to rural Appalachia, a mountainous region in the eastern United States and one of the most isolated and impoverished in the country. For this, this group of women was hired who, on the back of their horses, traveled the most difficult and dangerous roads to take books to the most remote areas. They were local women, almost a thousand, who otherwise would not have been able to work.
It was documented in his doctoral thesis by the American historian Donald C. Boyd, which he later turned into a book under the title The book women of Kentucky: The WPA Pack Horse Library Project. In it, she tells how in 1941 librarians already traveled a total of 42 of the 120 Kentucky counties on horseback and kept a collection of more than 500,000 books in circulation. In 1936 they had fed the reading soul of 50,000 families and 155 rural schools. “Mountain people loved Mark Twain,” explains writer Kathi Appelt at the book launch Down cut Shin Creek, which she co-wrote in 2019 with Jeanne Canella Schmitzer. Since many adults did not know how to read, picture books were the favourites, and at the top, Robinson Crusoe.
The terrible and narrow roads were not the only thing that these Amazons of the books had to face: also the suspicion that they aroused in an eminently illiterate population. In 1930, 31% of eastern Kentuckians could not read. Even so, they traveled an average of 30 kilometers a day loaded with books that they carried in saddlebags or briefcases. “It was very hard work, but also very satisfying. We were very proud of what we were doing. It was important work, and I'm glad I was a part of it," said librarian Gladys Hillman, whose testimony is part of the Oral History Research at the University of Kentucky.
They earned about 28 dollars a month, with which they had to cover not only the maintenance of the family but also the animal's food and their own equipment for riding: comfortable clothes and shoes and a coat for the winter.
They were not only bearers of print; They also took the opportunity to deliver medicines or news, as well as a bit of company. “Mountain women look to Pack Horse librarians as if they were angels bringing home a treasure that did not exist before. For many of them, the mobile library is their only window on the world, their only opportunity to learn about things that go beyond the hard and limited life of the mountains.
These are the words of the novelist and journalist Louis Adamic, who during the 1930s to 1940s dedicated himself to writing about the hardships of minority communities in the United States. “Workers saw sudden economic changes as a threat to their survival and literacy as a means of escaping a vicious economic trap,” Donald C. Boyd would write.
There are not a few books that have recorded this epic story on the other side of the Atlantic. In these parts, the illustrator Concha Pasamar recently even drew her for children in Bibliotecarias a caballo / Bibliotecàries a cavall (A fin de cuentos). They took their job as seriously as postmen of the day, crossing streams in wintry conditions, their feet frozen in their stirrups. Something that many writers and illustrators have seen worthy of immortalizing.
