BookTok, Book Bans, and Bibliotherapy: How Culture Wars Keep Repeating
Sadie Delaney’s Vision: Libraries as Tools for Healing and Justice
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I’ve been thinking a lot this week about porn, white women booktokers, and flashing back to the special hell of my grad school years. Yes, they are all related. Hear me out.
I know the bar is on the floor these days, but I like to think I have something someone might call a conscience. I hold doors, I let people merge ahead of me on the highway at the last minute because they aren’t paying attention, and I even pretend not to judge when people tell me they love Arby’s. I’m not perfect. However, I am struggling to feel good about the situation we find ourselves in, and like many, would really rather not with truly ANY of this. I don’t want my marriage to be questioned, I’d like to be in control of my body, and I’d like to read what I want. While I have been very sad because of these very real fears, I have also been sleepwalking around in a state of wonder. I am reminding myself of me in my first year of college, when, meeting a friend’s new boyfriend one morning, I allowed my eyebrows to run away to my hairline. If they knew morse code, they would have tapped “Him?!?!” but words were, at that moment, no longer necessary.
I have felt beyond words the past few weeks, which is sad because they are my greatest consolation. When I was in graduate school, I ended up writing about the history of bibliotherapy or uses of books as medicine in part because I’d informally been practicing on myself for years (as a non-MD I don’t have to observe “first do no harm” and therefore have read all of Twilight and 50 Shades).
Then as now, I wanted to understand how reading and its uses for health worked in different moments in history, and, tellingly, how arguments about what books made the best medicine and who got to decide this told me a lot about the “culture wars” of many eras.
For example, women (and some men) were institutionalized for mania related to reading novels in the nineteenth century.
Newspapers also feature accounts of runaway teens, inspired to seek new lives by the cheap novels they read (or so the parents inspiring these articles believed). Often, parents and authorities wanted to censor books that inspired women (and others) to seek out lives that existed outside acceptable norms. Sound familiar?
In the twentieth century, progressives (aka mostly white wealthy people who believed they could perfect society if just given enough control, a perennial bad idea) pushed for the inclusion of reading as a thing to be monitored and adjusted to support good health. Reading became a part of good hygiene, but only “good” books. These might include biographies of role models, histories, travel books, but not salacious romance novels or violent books.
Who determined what counted as “good” books, you might ask? Well, surprise, it was reformers, religious leaders, and, increasingly, medical authorities and librarians who were leaning into their own professionalization. None of this was done with evil intent. They all genuinely believed that they were on the side of the angels and would be thanked for their hard work to support people with healing books these readers would not know to prescribe themselves.
On the ground, this looked like charity. Librarians literally traveled to the front during World War I to dispense books at soldiers’ bedsides and then created a “hospital library service” that outlasted the war. They wanted to create a science where they could prescribe the right “medicine” for specific conditions, and define what kinds of reading would support healthy people in staying that way.
Some of this looks unhinged to us today. For example, they made their own prescription forms and started keeping case files.
Source: Dr. G.O. Ireland. “Bibliotherapy; the use of books as a form of treatment in a neuropsychiatric hospital.” Medical Bulletin of the Veterans Bureau 5 (1929): 440-5.
Readers posed their biggest challenge, however, as they are frequently rebellious. People don’t take kindly to being told what is good for them. For example, men in World War I wanted to read histories of the war, which were banned (it was believed they’d be too upsetting). The books they could choose from were also censored to “protect” them from books on socialism, Irish independence, and anything pro-German.
We can all probably relate to feeling rebellious as readers. Think about the times you’ve been required to read a book in school and turned against it before hitting page one if only because you were being forced into it. Picture me as the opposite of Sandy in Grease saying “tell me about it, stud” when the book was The Old Man in the Sea in my AP US Lit class. This kind of system also doesn’t account for the kismet of stumbling on a book and it being the exact right thing you need in that moment. That happened to me after my grandmother died. I somehow stumbled on the poetry of Mary Oliver and it was the exact thing I needed at that time.
Folks invested in this kind of bibliotherapy in the 50s and earlier did not react kindly to their prescriptions not being met with compliance and praise. For many, prescribing books became as much about censoring what readers could have access to. Many librarians argued that a book in the wrong hands could prove poisonous. One naval librarian wrote an article in the 30s saying that one Houdini biography must be censored because it doesn’t explain how he did his tricks, which could frustrate mentally ill patients. “Frustration” is more the word I’d use to describe me at a magic show having to deal with men making my patience disappear. For patients with tuberculosis, exciting books were thought dangerous because it could raise their pulse rates or temperatures. When we hear about this now, we may roll our eyes at this. It is also mind-blowing to realize just how much power people in this period believed reading had. It could literally alter your body and mind.
Maybe it’s not that hard for us to believe this from the distance of 2024 because of the beliefs conservatives allege to have about the dangers of some books today. Maggie Tokuda-Hall, author and a co-founder of Authors Against Book Bans recently shared some of the most extreme proposals from Project 2025, the conservative “wish list for a Trump presidency” created by the Heritage Foundation.
As Maggie goes on to note, the report suggests “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.” Now, let’s be clear, these folks are not talking about straight porn. They are talking about novels, nonfiction, and any materials created by and for members of the LGBTQ+ community. This includes children’s books featuring affirming content for trans or queer youth, YA novels, history books that accurately document the lives of queer people, etc. This is not porn. To call it such is hugely shaming and an attempt to pathologize the lives of people who do not fit the “norm” these folks want to institutionalize and codify into law.
Censorship has never supported someone’s health, and this does nothing but pathologize the lives of those these folks hate and the books that tell about us.
Also, not for nothing, but for people who hate porn they sure seem to have forgotten that it was once used to “cure” gay people. Psychologist Gerald Davison, for example, used Playboy to try to “cure” gay men by presenting another path in the form of Hugh Hefner’s centerfolds. This was meant to be a “kinder” alternative to aversion therapy, when people were tortured while looking at photos of their lovers projected on a wall. Spoiler alert, none of this worked. Davison was also converted himself by a gay activist into seeing that being gay is not a mental health disorder, but just another way of being.
I have been watching booktok enter into panic mode now that it appears the attack on (certain) books may continue. White women in particular are entering into a lot of pearl-clutching about the ways we let Black women down in the election, with some saying they are prepared to “listen” and “step back.” I would argue it is not our job to ask Black women to educate us/make us feel better about the state of things. It’s also not a time to throw up our hands in resignation at the truly scary possibilities we all face.
Instead, I think we should take a note from a bibliotherapist who did pathbreaking work and got little acclaim for it in her own lifetime. Sadie Peterson Delaney, born in 1889, trained as a librarian at New York Public Library in 1920-1921. At that time and until 1923, she worked at the 135th street branch in Harlem. There, she was integral to developing inclusive children’s collections and programming and building an African American collection. In 1923, she was recruited to the Tuskegee Veterans Administration hospital to develop their hospital library program. Though “Tuskegee” often lives in the popular imagination as the site of the horrific syphilis trials, it also became the basis for groundbreaking work in bibliotherapy because of Sadie Delaney. There, she treated African American patients who were physically disabled or living with mental or emotional issues. She took a collection of 200 books in a small room and built a program drawing on 13,000 books.
She understood that the core of libraries is their capacity to empower readers. “He finds himself in the library,” she wrote of a typical patient. To facilitate this, she filled her library with books by African American authors and decorated the walls with portraits of well-known African Americans. Patients could select their own books, and then could share about them at book club meetings. A vital part of her program was not simply inviting patients to read in isolation, but to find community with other readers and benefit from that time with others and the conversations resulting from these meetings.
This is what I am focusing on today, that I can make community where I am, find it where it already exists, and that we can advocate for the books that make us feel seen.
We can all do something to push back on attempts to ban books in our communities to preserve the rights of all readers (kids especially) to read what they want. Some of us want to get lost in books, and some of us should just get lost.
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This post made me think about how Horatio Alger's stories of a young man pulling himself up by his boot straps were so popular and lauded as important tomes... while Horatio Alger himself did not pull himself up by his own boot straps and BONUS - was a total creep who preyed upon young men! Kind of reminds me about men saying they want to protect women from encountering a trans person in the restroom, but will totally try to put their hands on an unwilling woman when she's just trying to get a drink at the bar (or a book at the library, as it were.)