Unlike other feminized professions, academic librarianship functions relatively autonomously within its parent bureaucracy. Therefore, academic libraries offer a unique model of workplace gendering and feminism. This qualitative, ethnographic study explores issues of feminism and gender in three academic libraries, each in a different region of the United States. Feminist challenges to bureaucracy emerged in the areas of hierarchy, division of labor, competition and collaboration, decision-making, and communication. Feminine practice in the libraries reflected private sphere attitudes toward...