A Pittsburgher trained the first French women as librarians during World War I
Jessie “Kit” Carson also read to French children whose fathers were fighting or had been killed in war-torn Europe.
By Janet Skeslien Charles, For the Post-Gazette, Apr 9, 2026, 1:00 AM
During World War I, Pittsburgh native Jessie “Kit” Carson sailed to France to create something that did not yet exist there – children’s libraries.
Long before television and radio programming for children, books were their only source of entertainment. Carson brought solace and story hour to a people in a heavily bombarded area, where one could drive for 15 hours and see nothing but ruins. After the war, she transformed dilapidated ambulances into bookmobiles, and trained French women as librarians.
This year, the 150th anniversary of Carson’s birth, we remember this fearless Pittsburgher who helped bring literacy and gender equality to France.
Carson was born in Bellevue on March 29, 1876. Her father, Thomas, worked as an executive at the Carnegie Steel Co. as her mother, Sadie, raised four daughters. At the turn of the century, Carson trained at the Carnegie Public Library. After earning her diploma, she worked in the children’s section of the Hazelwood Branch.
When her father died suddenly from pneumonia, the family fell on hard times. Yet the sisters continued to write ditties to each other and enjoy reading. Some favorite books included “The Story of a Bad Boy,” “The Boy’s King Arthur” and “The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte.”
In 1907, Carson moved to Tacoma, Wash., where she continued her library career while taking on other challenges, including becoming one of the first women to summit Mount Rainier, just a year after she arrived.
Soon, while she was the head of the children’s library, Carson’s section was declared “the most advanced in the library.”
Newspapers raved that “Miss Carson is considered the most capable children’s librarian on the Pacific coast.” According to the Tacoma Times, “Miss Carson’s fervent eloquence has won her a warm corner in the hearts of her little devotees.”
The next headline read: “Jessie Carson Goes to N.Y.”
In 1914, Carson took the position of assistant director of the children’s section of the New York Public Library, working under Anne Caroll Moore, the first librarian in America to allow children to sign for their own books.
Carson’s time in New York was deeply formative. When she wasn’t at the library, she volunteered for the National League for Woman’s Service, whose treasurer was Anne Morgan, the daughter of J.P. Morgan. Morgan handpicked Carson to head the library program of the American Committee for Devastated France, or le Comité Américain pour les Régions Dévastées (CARD).
This all-women aid organization helped French women who’d lost their homes, livelihoods and husbands. CARD volunteers had to speak French and possess a driver’s license. Many were wealthy women who’d been educated by private tutors and had taken yearly trips to France. Carson became one of CARD’s few salaried employees.
To prepare for her new role, she studied French and purchased French translations of children’s books. Though the job was in war-torn France, she jumped at the chance to lead again.
In a letter to her mother, her excitement at meeting Morgan is palpable.
“I have heard her give the most thrilling talk on France before the National Civic Association and it makes my blood hum to realize what a task I am undertaking to do,” she wrote. “I didn’t realize that Miss Morgan would be such a fairy godmother.”
In 1918, when Carson left New York for France, she was 42 years old and single, with no safety net and no savings. She didn’t even have the money to buy a steamer trunk for her clothes and books, or the $30 she needed for a train ticket to Pittsburgh to say goodbye to her family. Yet she left a secure job to cross an ocean and help French victims of war.
CARD volunteer Mary Needham later described the atmosphere in France when they arrived, during the intense fighting of the final months of World War I:
“Offensives were taking place everywhere. Events happened so quickly, activity became so feverish, that from one day to the next we had no opportunity to recover from fatigue.… More than 100 miles we traveled that day over shell-torn roads – I riding a rumble seat without any springs. When I arrived in Paris, I almost fell into my bed from utter exhaustion.
“I was awakened by Kit’s voice but I was too tired to answer. It came again, mixed with the sounds of the sirens. ‘Get up. There’s an air raid. Get up! The Germans are coming.’ ‘Let them come,’ I mumbled.
“By that time, Kit was upon me like a Boston policeman! ‘You will get up,’ she said between her teeth as she flung the bedclothes off me, leaving me shivering. I did get up.”
CARD headquarters was located 75 miles to the north of Paris and just 40 miles from the front. On the grounds of a destroyed castle, “the Cards” – the informal name for the organization’s members – lived in prefabricated wooden barracks, among the population they served.
Their uniforms – a blue military jacket and matching skirt – helped erase social differences between wealthy volunteers and less affluent employees. Upon arrival, Carson wrote, “It is hard to express what it meant to find ourselves in the center of destruction on all sides … where the church, the school house, the town hall were in ruins; where no one had a complete roof over his head.”
As the head of CARD’s library section, Carson focused on kids, many of whose fathers were either fighting at the front or dead. During the brutal German occupation of northern France, mothers and children were enslaved, starved and forced to do back-breaking work in the fields. As a result, children were undernourished and their spines were permanently curved.
Committee members noted that these kids had never learned to smile. But during her story hour, Carson read French translations of books, introducing the children to characters such as Tom Sawyer and Anne of Green Gables. She created cozy reading nooks with child-sized tables, chairs and bookshelves. Elements we take for granted today were brand new back then.
At CARD headquarters, Carson befriended French villagers as well as her fellow international workers. Mary Breckinridge, a nurse from Kentucky, noted that Cards worked “almost around the clock in that land of stark tragedy.” Breckinridge praised Carson’s reading room, noting it “was as frequented as my clinic by a literate and book-starved people.”
Back home in Pittsburgh, tragedy struck. Carson’s mother, Sadie, died in 1920. A CARD report notes, “I don’t know what the death of Miss Carson’s mother will make in her plans, but it would be a distinct loss if she should leave us at this moment.”
Carson remained in France, where her impact – and legacy – truly began to take hold.
Continue/Read Original Article: A Pittsburgher trained the first French women as librarians during World War I | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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