The Power to Name : A Review Essay

This work by Hope A. Olson is a much-pruned and rewritten version of her 1996 dissertation at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.¹ Its original version is mentioned because in it she explains more fully the character of the radical feminist deconstructionist approach she brings to her task. However, the muted explanation of her perspective in the present volume does not ultimately alter the character of the work, which is both a polemic against what she concludes are male-dominated subject access tools and an apologia for a feminist understanding or approach to the tools.

The central objective of The Power to Name is convincingly to characterize bias in classification and subject heading work, that is, to show that bias thoroughly marginalizes and sometimes excludes women and women minorities altogether. In the process of satisfying this objective the author also provides an etiology for the bias. Thus, the work essentially accomplishes two tasks, each of which will be examined here.

Of the first of these two tasks, Olson states that her own analysis of Dewey Decimal Classification numbers and Library of Congress subject headings for eleven sample books "combines a feminist perspective with attention to particular groups of women identifying with one or more of the following: women of colour, African American women, Chicanas, lesbians, Asian American women, working class women, Jewish women, [and] North American Aboriginal women" (184). More specifically, she states that "the literature on cataloguing feminist material and materials for women illustrates that the existing standards include sexist terminology and put topics in uncongenial contexts with a sexist result. That is, they juxtapose them in classifications and references in such a way as to create a pejorative effect. . . . [T]hey treat women as exceptions to a masculine norm, they ghettoize women's issues by separating them from the rest of knowledge, or they omit women's issues altogether" (9). Ultimately, Olson accomplishes in a notable way her central task of characterizing bias convincingly. In her final chapter she also offers a solution to the problem in what she calls an "eccentric" approach to subject access. The latter consists of the use of techniques to "breach the limits" of present practice—that is, to make present practice permeable, to make spaces in it for alternative views, and to be dynamic in accepting changes (227). Unfortunately, however, this explanation is very brief and provides only a very general approach to solving the problem.

Olson's approach to accomplishing the second task is to provide a feminist analysis of selections of what she considers key texts—the subject rules of Charles A. Cutter's Rules for a Dictionary Catalog (4th edition, 1904) and Melvil Dewey's introduction to his Decimal Classification (first written in 1876 and expanded continuously through the later editions). Of these she develops what amounts to a series of basic assertions. First, these two writings serve as canonical texts that have shaped subsequent subject heading and classification (at least DDC classification) work. In her own words, these two writings "control cataloging" (183). Second, the process of naming subjects and assigning them to documents amounts to the power to construct reality. Third, the reality constructed by these two canonical texts and their subsequent application is masculine centered and marginalizes women. Fourth, Cutter and Dewey passed on that constructed reality of bias by creating universal languages that have been adopted by successive generations of library subject access workers up to the present time. And fifth, the process by which such bias has arisen has been intentional and directed—not simply passive. In Olson's view, naming subjects is a matter of consciously deciding "what to represent and what to leave unnamed" (4, emphasis added). Catalogs and classification systems do not "just passively reflect the dominant values in some neutral or objective manner but [select] those values for expression" (2).

Olson's treatment...