Library Bureaucracy as “Scold’s Bridle”: Epistemic Injustice, Linguistic Muting, and the Silencing of Women

Recent cancellations of public library events featuring women speakers highlight a crisis in professional and institutional ethics.

Image: Amy Girard, with original images from SAFS and Moms4LibertyYolo

(Note that this article was updated 9/7/2023)

In May of 2023, the London (Ontario) Public Library system made international headlines when its administration-–without any apparent awareness of the irony involved—denied a room booking for British author Dr. Joanna Williams to deliver a free public talk entitled “Sex, Gender, and the Limits of Free Speech on Campus.”  In its response to the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS)–-who had requested the room-–Library administration claimed that the booking raised “multiple policy concerns” and cited the Library’s commitment to “anti-oppression,” while also claiming that  “the Renter or Event content is or is likely to be in violation of Library policy, including, but not limited to, the Library’s Rules of Conduct, Charter of Library Use or Workplace Harassment and Sexual Harassment Prevention policies.” SAFS President Mark Mercer reportedly asked the library’s meetings and events coordinator, Robert Giorgini, how any of these policies might possibly apply to their event, to no avail. While SAFS was able to relocate Williams’ talk to a local hotel, she was openly displeased about the incident, arguing that it demonstrated “bureaucratic cowardice” on the part of Library administration, and a failure to meet its obligations to provide a forum for public debate.

More recently, another third-party public library event received widespread media coverage for similar reasons, this one in the United States. On Sunday August 20^th, 2023, an event at the Mary L. Stephens Davis Library in Davis, California (a branch of the Yolo County Library)—sponsored by the Yolo County chapter of Moms for Liberty—was shut down by the Regional Library’s Director following nearly ten minutes of audience outbursts, which no library staff attempted to control. The event, a “Forum on Fair and Safe Sports for Girls,” featured Sophia Lorey, a young female athlete who was attempting to explain why she believed that the participation of males in female competitive athletic categories was inherently unfair to girls.  In the remarkable video of the event shared on X, one can hear members of the audience erupt angrily as soon as Lorey says the word “men”, with the Library’s Regional Director Scott Love threatening to shut the event down if she persisted in “misgendering,” citing not only a California law (which went un-named) but the Library’s policies on respectful conduct. In short order, this is what he did, and the event moved to a nearby park. In the days that followed, media coverage of the controversy appeared to swing between both sides, asking rhetorically if Lorey’s speech went too far, as well as if the Director-–and by extension the Library itself-–had violated the speaker’s First Amendment rights, with some suggesting that legal repercussions were not out of the question. The situation deteriorated even further in the subsequent days and weeks when bomb threats were made against the library.

In both cases, women engaging in legal speech acts were denied access to meeting rooms in public libraries dedicated to that very purpose. While justified ostensibly on the basis of the respective events’ incompatibility with internal policies, these official actions were clearly targeting the ideas being expressed by the speakers in a manner that would seem to contravene the professional principles of librarianship espoused in both Canada and the United States, to say nothing of established law in each country governing freedom of speech and expression. Indeed, these incidents are, on their face, such remarkable departures from standard and conventional practice that we should examine the many issues arising from them in some detail. 

In this essay, we shall consider these events in terms of the extent to which they demonstrate Violations of Legal and Professional Principles; the prioritization of Bureaucratization over Professional Ethics; Epistemic Injustice and Linguistic Muting; the Presumption of Shared Values; the Certainty Trap; and Institutional Ideological Capture. But first, a few ground rules:

1. It should be noted that these events are not isolated incidents: In recent months, actor Kirk Cameron and his conservative "Brave Books" events have also run into difficulties in securing access to public library meeting rooms, often through deliberately-scheduled counter-programming under open guidance from the ALA to “exploit loopholes” to block the events. In other words, these two incidents should not be seen as isolated from larger political forces affecting our profession, since censorship efforts are coming from within our profession, even at the level of Library Regional Directors and ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom. Accordingly, these two events are illustrative of a larger problem.

2. Therefore, our purpose here is to gain a principle-based and theoretical understanding the incidents in question, rather than to level blame at any particular individuals. We believe these incidents offer “teachable moments” about public libraries as institutions and their governance in general. 

3. Finally, we note—as is consistent with the tenets of library neutrality—that this analysis is not concerned with the substance of the claims of the respective speakers, but only with the legal, professional and institutional principles involved in the specific incidents. 

1) Violations of Legal and Professional Principles: 

In these cases, we see (respectively) potential violations of the First Amendment, the ALA Library Bill of Rights, the ALA Code of Ethics, the Canadian Federation of Library Associations’ (CFLA¹) Statement on Intellectual Freedom and the CFLA Intellectual Freedom Position on Protest and Disagreement related to Collections, Programs and Speakers in Libraries. To whit:

ALA Library Bill of Rights

VI. Libraries which make exhibit spaces and meeting rooms available to the public they serve should make such facilities available on an equitable basis, regardless of the beliefs or affiliations of individuals or groups requesting their use.

CFLA Statement on Intellectual Freedom and Libraries

Libraries have a core responsibility to safeguard and foster free expression and the right to safe and welcoming places and conditions. To this end, libraries make available their public spaces and services to individuals and groups without discrimination.

In the Davis case, the Library’s Regional Director shut down the event in response to hearing the beliefs expressed by the speakers at the public forum, stating that they did not adhere to the library’s respectful conduct policy. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) these actions violated the First Amendment rights of both the speakers and the people who wished to hear the speakers:

In making its meeting rooms available for public use, the library created a public forum where the First Amendment applies. Although government entities can establish reasonable, viewpoint-neutral policies for such spaces, they cannot impose restrictions based on the ideology or viewpoint of the speakers who use the meeting rooms. Love’s abrupt halting of the event because speakers used language expressing viewpoints that he (or spectators) disfavored, or that Love incorrectly thought violated state law, infringed the First Amendment rights of the speakers and the audience members who attended the event to hear the discussion. 

While the Regional Director may have been attempting to create a respectful environment in line with Statement 9 of the ALA Code of Ethics which affirms “the inherent dignity and rights of every person”, his actions were inconsistent with Statement 2 of the Code, which reads “We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources''.  Dr. Emily Knox has argued that these two statements appear together in the Code and therefore “are seen as two principles which enhance each other”. There is a tension between Statements 2 and 9 that must be wrestled with, but one does not take away intellectual freedom in order to create a respectful environment.  In the case of the Davis Library incident, intellectual freedom was removed when the Library Regional Director stopped legally-protected speech that the library was obligated to allow. Constitutional First Amendment rights were infringed upon ostensibly in the interest of achieving a respectful environment. As FIRE points out in a letter to the Yolo County Library “it is well-settled that government actors – including public library staff – have no authority in any type of forum to prohibit speech based on the ideas or view conveyed.” 

At the Davis Library an act of censorship occurred. Dr. Knox notes, “No matter what, censorship is about power. It is about imposing power over people and saying I have better judgment than you do over what you need and what will make a difference.” If one wants to protect people, one doesn’t take away their rights.  A person could exercise their right to be respected by removing themselves if they felt disrespected, but neither the speakers or their audience were able to exercise their right to speak or to hear speech once the forum was shut down. As well, the library staff on hand had an obligation to try to quiet the disruptions in the audience to allow the event to proceed, and this didn’t happen. 

The London case is somewhat different, as the SAFS event was denied access to the Library altogether, and as such constituted prior restraint. Still, the equivalent Canadian principles apply—in this case the CFLA Statement on Intellectual Freedom and Libraries—which holds that

Libraries have a core responsibility to safeguard and facilitate access to constitutionally protected expressions of knowledge, imagination, ideas, and opinion, including those which some individuals and groups consider unconventional, unpopular or unacceptable…To this end, libraries make available their public spaces and services to individuals and groups without discrimination.

Furthermore, the CFLA’s 2019 Position on Third Party Use of Publicly Funded Library Meetings Rooms and Facilities states that 

Publicly funded libraries that make exhibit spaces and meeting rooms available to the public they serve should make such facilities available on an equitable basis, regardless of the beliefs or affiliations of individuals or groups requesting their use.

CFLA-FCAB affirms controversial expression is supported in the library. Equally so, challenge to controversial expression is supported. CFLA-FCAB does not, however, endorse the exercise of prior restraint as a means to avoiding controversy in the library.

In refusing the SAFS booking, the London Public Library did not make their facilities available on an equitable basis but rather seem to have prejudged the beliefs and affiliations of the speaker, and as such exercised prior restraint against them.  

As regards the ALA Code of Ethics, the actions of the Davis bureaucrats would seem to flout both Statement 2 (“We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources”) and Statement 7 (“We distinguish between our personal convictions and professional duties and do not allow our personal beliefs to interfere with fair representation of the aims of our institutions or the provision of access to their information resources”).

2) Bureaucratization over Professional Ethics: 

In both London and Davis, officials representing their respective public libraries cited their internal policies as justification for denying the speakers access to public meeting rooms. Not only was the relevance and applicability of the policies in question extremely dubious—nobody was going to be harassed in London, nor were any named and present individuals going to be “misgendered” in Davis-–but their use flew in the face of the professional principles and ethics cited above. On a basic institutional level, neither Library was open or transparent about the named policies and how they were applied. Instead, policies seem to have been used in an arbitrary fashion to circumvent professional ethics and conventional institutional commitments. 

3.) Epistemic Injustice and Linguistic Muting

To the extent that both speakers were rejected owing to the content of their ideas and knowledge claims, they may then be said to have suffered from what Miranda Fricker (2007) refers to as epistemic injustice, or discrimination against (or disbelief regarding) an individual (or group) as knowing agents based on their social category. In the Davis case this was further compounded by the official demand that the speaker not use specific words, thereby denying her the very language necessary to make her case. This form of epistemic injustice is described in communication theory as “muted group theory” (or MGT), or the ways in which minority groups tend to be marginalized and silenced by dominant communication modes controlled by the majority. As American feminist scholar Cheris Kramarae (2005) writes,

Muted group theory suggests that people attached or assigned to subordinate groups may have a lot to say, but they tend to have relatively little power to say it without getting into a lot of trouble. Their speech is disrespected by those in the dominant positions; their knowledge is not considered sufficient for public decision-making or policy making processes of that culture; their experiences are interpreted for them by others; and they are encouraged to see themselves as represented in the dominant discourse. The theory further suggests that an important way that a group maintains its dominance is by stifling and belittling the speech and ideas of those they label as outside the privileged circle (p. 55).     

We would suggest that Kramarae’s description is entirely apt for what transpired in Davis: Lorey had only just begun to make her case and got “into a lot of trouble” for it, was disrespected and belittled, her knowledge and lived experience dismissed, and she was denied the language needed to communicate.

It also can’t be ignored that each act of silencing of these women’s right to speak on topics concerning gender politics was at the hand of a male bureaucrat-–decidedly not a good look for a public institution! British lesbian feminist and author Sheila Jeffreys likens the contemporary silencing of women to the barbaric practice of the “scold’s bridle,” a form of humiliating 16th Century metal headgear designed to compress a woman’s tongue, making it impossible to speak. 

Image: “Scold’s Bridle,” Southeastern Star [flickr]

That the bridle could be outfitted with a bell to draw a mob of onlookers to hurl abuse at the afflicted woman makes it a potent metaphor for the online rape and death threats which so many women defending their sex-based rights have been experiencing in recent years.

4) Presumption of Shared Values: 

The institutional actions in both London and Davis (as well as the strategic suppression of Kirk Cameron’s planned events) were motivated by an underlying presumption of broadly-shared values among their user communities, and the concomitant and confident assumption that those who don’t share the institution’s values are beyond the pale. While intended specifically to exclude the speakers and their sponsoring organizations, the actions taken also ignored the possibility that many well-intentioned members of the public-–including those identifying within the 2SLGBTQ+ community—and indeed the libraries’ own staff might be interested in or even sympathetic to the perspectives on offer. This latter possibility should particularly trouble the administrations of these libraries, for they have now certainly brought a chilling effect to their institutions, whereby library staff will be afraid to express their opinions on the matter. As Williams further argues, the actions also constitute a form of misanthropy, in thinking the worst of people, such that if people’s access to information can’t be controlled, they will behave in terrible ways.     

5.) Certainty Trap 

These incidents further exhibit the characteristics of what sociologist Dr. Ilana Redstone refers to as the “Certainty Trap”, or the “resolute unwillingness to recognize the possibility that we may not be right in our beliefs and claims” and that “there’s more than one way to see a given issue.” as I (MD) summarized in a previous piece on this Substack, 

The Certainty Trap…is fuelled by three fallacies: the Settled Question Fallacy, the Fallacy of Known Intent and the Fallacy of Equal Knowledge. The first simply asserts that the matter in question is closed to any further debate, when many reasonable people can argue that it isn’t; the second assigns malign motivations to people rather than acknowledging they may have good faith arguments; and the third arrogantly assumes that, if only one’s opponents knew what you did, then they would agree with you.

This is why library neutrality and intellectual freedom are so essential that they are embedded in our professional ethics: as librarians we have to acknowledge our fallibility, that we may not be correct and that there are many ways to see issues—perspectives that people may sincerely hold in good faith. No such possibilities appear to have been entertained in either London or Davis.  

6.) Institutional Ideological Capture: 

As Joanna Williams argues in her (rescheduled and relocated) lecture, institutional actions such as these reveal that some public library administrators have entirely abandoned any attempt at neutrality and have openly chosen a side in a contentious debate. Again, elsewhere on this Substack I (MD) have argued that “taking a side” by a public library by definition means siding against other members of the community, essentially excluding them from the library’s community of users (a point also raised in this Substack’s open letter Against Radical Empathy). This signals the ideological capture of a publicly-funded institution, and a violation of the public trust. In another previous post, library neutrality and due attention to the diversity of values in the community were shown to be tied to pluralism as an overriding value, and the essential role of the library in working towards a pluralistic society. Public libraries should therefore promote institutional tolerance for many perspectives in their public spaces. Such multiplicity of viewpoints can only help those in specific communities learn the democratic norms necessary in a healthy liberal democracy, and the role of the public library therein.

In other words, there is a community educational aspect in both of these incidents (and in others) where norms are important, and public library administrators have an important role to play in working with other community leaders, in developing those norms rather than flouting them or investing themselves in one viewpoint or another, and citing legalese and bureaucratic language in service of any specific ideology.

Conclusions and Recommendations

In light of this analysis, we would offer some specific recommendations concerning library and professional governance:

1. Library administrations should be sufficiently trained in the legal foundations of freedom of expression as well as the principles on which the library profession are based concerning intellectual freedom and library neutrality;

2. Internal library policies concerning civil and respectful conduct must be consistent with these legal contexts and professional principles;

3. Oversight by library boards should ensure that these internal policies are applied in a fair and transparent manner, and in harmony with legal and professional principles; and

4. To ensure the reproduction of this ethic, constitutional matters of freedom of expression, as well as professional and institutional principles related to intellectual freedom and library neutrality should comprise mandatory components of the curricula at all ALA-accredited library schools.   

We have argued that the denial of access and summary ejection of female speakers from public libraries in Ontario and California for expressing opinions to which library bureaucrats objected represent two fairly glaring cases of institutional failure. All the legal, professional, ethical and institutional provisions intended to ensure that the public meeting rooms in question were to be made available for their intended purpose were circumvented, with the result that these women were silenced. The scold’s bridle is replaced by bureaucracy. 

It was plainly in the public interest that the views on offer be heard and debated, in accordance with the foundational principles on which libraries in both countries were successfully built. That these libraries and government actors would seek to silence women who were addressing matters of both freedom of speech and the rights of women and girls is a troubling indication of a profession that is in danger of losing sight entirely of its essential role in serving the public interest. 

Sources

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.

Kramarae, C. (2005). “Muted Group Theory and Communication: Asking Dangerous Questions.” WL. Women and Language, 28(2), 55-61,72.

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1.  In French, Fédération canadienne des associations de bibliothèques (FCAB).