When A Town Loses It Library, Many Residents Lose Their Literary Freedoms

I have just started reading The Woman Reader by Belinda Jack, a history of women's literacy. Even the introduction talks about the many ways in which books have been censored, by the church and even in other countries. And though the censoring of women's books has been less formal, women's reading especially has caused a lot of anxiety from men in power.
Jack says:

"For much of history it was this fear of women assuming greater power that caused the most unease. One strategy was--and is--to deny women education, but with the passage of time women in many parts of the world did become numerate and literate. This did not mean that they had free access to the material they most wanted to read, of course. The revolutionary moment, for the woman reader, comes in those parts of the world where women were both able to read, and had free access to a significant range of material. In many cases what mattered most was to be able to use libraries."

(Bold is mine.)

Here I would like to note that I live in America, in the area of Roseburg, Oregon, where the county shut down all of our libraries because they "couldn't afford it." I remain skeptical, as this is a big timber-producing area, with all of the Federal dollars that implies. It is only through volunteers at Sutherlin and other nearby small-town libraries that we even have any tiny libraries at all--our whole library system is gone. And there are no libraries in Roseburg, the biggest city in the county and the county seat.
These circumstances make the very next sentences from this book all that much more interesting--and alarming--for me:

The writer Doris Lessing, who grew up in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), makes the point very clearly: 'With a library you are free,' she writes, 'not confined by temporary political climates.' For Lessing, who saw in South Africa a regime's appalling attempts to deny freedom to the majority, access to books is the most fundamental human right. The library, she goes on to say, 'is the most democratic of institutions because no-one--but no-one at all--can tell you what to read and when and how." 

(Quoted from Doris Lessing, Index on Censorship, vol. 28, no. 2 (Apr. 1999), pp. 158-9)

Pretty chilling that because of county budget priorities, Douglas County residents who can't afford a computer or books of their own live, at least in one sense, like those in colonial Rhodesia. Modern white Americans, especially, like to believe they live in a more enlightened place than either Africa or the past.
Who knows whether the taking of literacy freedoms was done on purpose by the county commissioners. But the effects themselves are enough of a concern.