Virignia in Her Public Sphere

Virginia explains her reasons for leaving the teaching field and becoming a librarian.

Virginia Hansen, librarian and Mrs. David A Burgoyne, library board member preparing for a library open house.

 Like many of the women in her community, Virginia was an active member of the LDS church who regularly participated in religious activities. Unlike many of them, however, Virginia also had a career outside the home. In fact, she had two careers, beginning with teaching in elementary school and ending as the director of the Logan Public Library. She is a single example of the working women of the 1950's, and how their "spinsterhood" allowed them to partipcate in their community in ways that others could not. 

Interestingly, Virginia’s career decisions seem to have been focused on the same values of child-rearing and maternal instinct that many of her contemporaries were focused on in the home. The difference was, that Virginia had the choice of how much time to spend and how much to invest in the well-being of these children. In fact, according to the above letter, it was when she was expected to raise the schoolchildren with little help from their parents that she decided a change of career was necessary. Specifically, she said that her job was to help them learn academic facts, not to teach them how real life worked.

Despite her lack of biological children, Virginia still had the opportunity to tell stories, tie shoelaces, and be with children throughout her career.  Her specialty at the library was storytelling, and she carried a rag doll named Pitiful Pearl with her everywhere because the doll would help her to tell stories. Near the end of her time at the Logan Library, a man wrote to her from CalTech, where he had become a world-famous physicist. He had grown up in Logan, listening to her stories at the library, and he credited her with his first love of learning that spurred him onward to his career.

Virginia demolished stereotypes in her public life. Although she had a full-time job which she loved and to which she was dedicated, that did not detract from her involvement in the raising and loving of children. Among her papers are letters from young people, one from a young girl who thanked her for a visit and politely asked when she could come again. Another was a letter to Santa which Virginia had helped a little boy to write. These examples and many others are proof that, even though she was a career woman on the surface, her feminine and maternal instincts survived even without children of her own.