Arleen McCarty Hynes (1916–2006) was a librarian, and later a Roman Catholic sister, who pioneered bibliotherapy. Hynes received the Dorothea Dix award for her contributions, including an important book that remains standard. She is, in the words of Shifra Baruchson-Arbib, "the person credited for creating the practical concept of modern bibliotherapy," and in the words of Dr. Nicholas Mazza, "one of the pioneers of biblio/poetry therapy."
Early life and education
She was born Mary Arleen McCarty, the daughter of Mary Gannon McCarty, who was born in Ballina Ireland, and Veatus Cantious McCarty, born in Iowa. She was one of a pair of premature identical twins, and her mother died in that childbirth. Because her father had seven other children to raise, she and her sister were brought up by a paternal aunt and uncle, Josie Dunn McCarty and James Maurice McCarty. After attending public elementary and high school, she graduated from Sheldon Junior College in 1936, and then attended the Vogue School of Dress Design (advertised in Vogue magazine) from 1936 to 1937. She then went to the College of St. Catherine in Minnesota for two years (1938–40), got married, and then returned in to continue until 1942, when she earned a degree in library science.
Career
Work in Collegeville, Minnesota
After her marriage to Emerson Hynes, a professor at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, she worked in the College of St. Benedict library. She and her husband hosted guests that included monks and visitors from St. John's, and they also brought together groups of Catholic artists, writers, and thinkers who were part of what was called "The Movement," including Dorothy Day, sculptor Don Humphrey, and J. F. and Betty Powers. Powers called her husband Emerson "a fervent practitioner and leader in the Catholic rural- and family-life movements." Arleen Hynes was part of the Catholic Rural Life Movement, the Liturgical Movement, and the Christian Family Movement, and she served a term as National Family Life Chair for the Council of Catholic Women. As progressive Catholics they were both active in the Catholic Worker movement, and the Agrarian society.
Work with Senator Eugene McCarthy in Washington, DC
1959, Democrat Eugene McCarthy (not to be confused with Republican Joseph McCarthy of the 1950s anticommunist hearings) was elected a Senator from Minnesota. Hynes's husband Emerson had gone to college at St. John's with McCarthy, and been the best man in his wedding. Emerson Hynes left a 20-year academic career to move the family to Washington and become McCarthy's legislative assistant. They lived in Arlington, Virginia, and she served on the National Council on Aging, hosted a study group on Vatican II, and was president of the Virginia chapter of the American Association of University Women, producing an important study in 1962.
McCarthy ran for president in 1968, and Arleen Hynes served as the head of Volunteers for McCarthy. Emerson Hynes retired in 1968 after McCarthy lost his bid to gain the US presidential nomination. Some speculated that enormous stress from the loss of their son, Michael, who drowned in the Potomac river in 1970 at age 18, may have weakened his health. The failed campaign also took a toll, and the combination may have led to Emerson Hynes's first stroke, which happened at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. Several more strokes followed, leaving Arleen Hynes a widow when Emerson died of a heart attack at age 56 in 1971, only six months after Michael died.
Developing bibliotherapy at St. Elizabeths Hospital
In 1970, shortly before her husband's anticipated death and at his urging, Hynes found work as a patient's librarian at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Southeast Washington, DC, the nation's only federal mental hospital. They assigned her a room for the library that had formerly been the morgue. Although the library had existed since 1903 and was one of the earliest patient libraries in the country, it had no windows, only one skylight, and 10,000 uncatalogued books, with many piled high on the floor.
She expanded the library's services to more than 100 patients a week out of a population of 4,000, launched a lecture series and movie screenings, and allowed patients to read in the library and listen to music. She collected artwork that they could borrow to put in their rooms. She began a program reading to patients who she said "had never been read to before," and the groups included people who had experienced homelessness, battered women, former felons, alcoholics, and drug addicts.
She described a favorite group: