Mary Emily Foy (July 13, 1862 – February 21, 1962) was the first woman head librarian of the

Los Angeles Public Library The Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) is a public library system in Los Angeles, California, operating separate from the Los Angeles County Public Library system. The system holds more than six million volumes, and with around 19 million resid ...

, appointed to the job in 1880 at the age of 18. She had graduated the year before from

Los Angeles High School Los Angeles High School is the oldest public high school in the Southern California region and in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Its colors are royal blue and white and the teams are called the Romans. Los Angeles High School is a publ ...

. She served for only four years but left a legacy for Los Angeles librarians to remember.

Early life

Foy was born in

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

, California.

Predecessors

Women played a subsidiary role in Los Angeles Public Library affairs for many years. On the library's founding in 1872, women were excluded from even using it. ::However, this situation quickly changed. Within its first six months of operation, the board discussed allowing “ladys” limited membership, letting them use their male relatives’ membership cards to gain access to the library’s collections.13In 1876 the library added a “Ladies Room” to its complex. Although the new room did not contain books, it did house a number of popular magazines as well as comfortable sofas and chairs for local clubwomen to use. John C. Littlefield, the editor of the Los Angeles ''Weekly Express,'' was appointed the city's first librarian in 1872. Littlefield was an asthmatic and would smoke jimsonweed in his office much to the dismay of patrons. He was succeeded in 1879 by an untrained partisan appointee, Patrick Connolly, who, it was suggested, was an alcoholic who missed more than his share of days at work and was discharged by the library board, which then vowed to name a "lady librarian."

At the Los Angeles Public Library

Foy, the 18-year-old daughter of merchant Samuel Foy, asked the Foys' next-door neighbor, Mayor John Toberman, for the job and he advised her to canvass all of the City Council members, which she did. She then spent the summer of 1880 in the San Francisco Bay area, working with librarians in San Francisco and Oakland to learn her trade. She later wrote that her responsibilities on the job in the library at Main and Temple Streets in Los Angeles included: ::setting up a catalogue system, keeping the library accounts, acting as hostess in the Ladies Reading Room, serving as referee for ongoing chess games in the Newspaper Room, and settling bets made in the downstairs saloon on such questions as, "Who wrote Webster’s Dictionary: Noah or Daniel?" According to Sheri D. Irvin, in those days the appointment of women to Los Angeles city positions was often done for semi-charitable reasons such as a woman's need for financial support. When Mayor Toberman left office, a new library board was appointed and another woman appointed in Foy's place. Foy did not, however, leave quietly: She "published a valedictory in the newspaper where she criticized the utgoingboard for its lack of involvement and interest in the library." The woman appointed to replace Foy was the daughter of L.D. Gavitt, Jessie. The

house A house is a single-unit residential building. It may range in complexity from a rudimentary hut to a complex structure of wood, masonry, concrete or other material, outfitted with plumbing, electrical, and heating, ventilation, and air c ...

where Mary Foy was born on July 13, 1862, and in which she lived is Los Angeles Historical Cultural Monument No. 8.

As an educator and champion of women's rights

Later she taught at Alameda School in Downey and the Eighth Street School in Los Angeles and by 1903 was teaching at Los Angeles High School. Newspaper columnist John Adams, writing in the ''Downey Eagle,'' said that Foy was a "strong-willed woman" who "campaigned for

Woodrow Wilson Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856February 3, 1924) was the 28th president of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921. He was the only History of the Democratic Party (United States), Democrat to serve as president during the Prog ...

during his national political career and fought for decades for the California Progressive Movement and Women’s Rights". She was listed in the 1913 yearbook of Los Angeles High School as a "prominent club woman and suffragist".

Personal life

On February 21, 1962, Foy died. She was 99.

Legacy

Foy was honored with the establishment of the Mary Foy California Room in the new public library building at Fifth and Olive Streets, though that room was not part of the redesign of the library building when it was reconstructed after two serious fires in 1986. Foy's tenure at the

Los Angeles Central Library Richard J. Riordan Central Library, primarily known as the Los Angeles Central Library, is the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL), in Downtown Los Angeles. It is named after Mayor of Los Angeles Richard Riordan. It consists o ...

is chronicled in

Susan Orlean Susan Orlean (born October 31, 1955) is an American journalist, television writer, and bestselling author of '' The Orchid Thief'' and '' The Library Book''. She has been a staff writer for ''The New Yorker'' since 1992, and has contributed artic ...

's ''The Library Book''.

References

External links

Mary Emily Foy Collection at the Autry National Center

California Library Hall of Fame – Mary Foy (1862–1962)