Women in the Literary Landscape

by Doris Weatherford, Rosalind Reisner, Nancy Rubin Stuart, Valerie Tomaselli, Blanche Wiesen Cook

Overview

From colonial times, women have been at the forefront of significant developments in the literary community and the book world. Despite this important history, no single publication has provided an overview of women’s roles in writing, publishing, bookselling, and librarianship. With Women in the Literary Landscape, in honor of its Centennial, the WNBA breaks new ground with a narrative connecting women’s contributions in these fields with the relevant social history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936196821
Publisher:	C&R Press
Publication date:	03/15/2018
Pages:	289
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.66(d)

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CHAPTER 1

WOMEN, LITERARY PURSUITS, AND THE BOOK WORLD

Milestones and Trends

Since the earliest times in U.S. history, women shaped the literary community and the book world. It was in the realm of the home, to which most women were confined in our country's infancy, that their talents as authors, readers, and teachers were bred. And it will come as no surprise that some of women's first forays into the professional book world were connected to education and literacy: Women found outlets and, in many cases, led the way in the development of libraries and children's literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also found fertile ground as editors in the world of such periodicals as Godey's Lady's Book, tailored to women and the home, and as taste-makers in their coverage of books and other cultural trends of the day.

Along with the growing women's rights movement during the Progressive Era, there were other advances in the early decades of the twentieth century, including Women's National Book Association cofounder Madge Jenison's Sunwise Turn Bookshop and Blanche Knopf's leading role in the 1915 establishment of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Throughout the twentieth century, many women broke through the confines of the male-dominated business of book publishing as publishers, editors, and marketing and sales professionals. In today's book world, it's safe to say that, while women's roles — and yes, incomes — are not fully commensurate with that of men, they now lead the way in many areas. This first section of Women in the Literary Landscape tells the story of women's hard work, leadership, and innovation in shaping the literary community and adding to the vital cultural landscape that defines the United States.

Colonial and Revolutionary America

A woman wrote America's first secular book: Without telling Anne Bradstreet, her brother-in-law took her poems from Massachusetts to London and returned with copies of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650). Bradstreet was the busy mother of eight, yet made time to write poetry that still stands up well today. No matter the field, women always have been there — and without women, history ends in a generation.

Moreover, until very recently, they did this without access to formal education. Harvard College had been established when Anne Bradstreet wrote, but more than three centuries would pass before women were allowed to study there. In fact, almost two centuries would pass between Harvard's 1636 founding and the admission of women to any college in the United States. The first was Oberlin College in frontier Ohio in 1833, and even there, women had to follow a "Ladies Course." Yet despite this and other routine discrimination, women were active participants in the literary community in America from the beginning.

They wrote of their own experiences, such as Mary Rowlandson's A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, which told of her life when she was taken by Rhode Island's Wampanoag tribe. Published in 1682, it was reissued in at least thirty editions. Women wrote travelogues, such as Sarah Kemble Knight's account of her business trip from Boston to New York City in 1704, The Journal of Madam Knight, published in 1825. Her cheerful story of overcoming obstacles on the horseback journey also contained many economic and cultural observations.

Women were among the country's first publishers as they took the helm at several newspapers. Sarah Updike Goddard began Rhode Island's Providence Gazette in 1762 and moved on to Philadelphia, where she published the Pennsylvania Chronicle. Her daughter, Mary Katherine Goddard, used the Maryland Journal to issue the first copy of the Declaration of Independence that included the signers' names. Other women published newspapers from Boston down to Richmond, and the governments of several colonies appointed women as official printers.

Colonial women arguably had a higher status than would later be the case. Anne Catherine Hoof Green, for example, was named the official printer of the Maryland colony in 1767, and even as she was caring for her fourteen children, she also published the Maryland Gazette. Clementina Rind, a widow like Green, published the Virginia Gazette, and that colony's House of Burgesses made her the official printer in 1774. Nor did these women hesitate to express their political opinions. Most supported the revolution, but Margaret Green Draper advocated for the established government in her Boston News-Letter. Her conservative views were popular enough that she drove six competitors out of business before the British evacuated and she had to flee.

Mercy Otis Warren, who lived south of Boston, anonymously wrote plays that satirized the British enemy; she later published a three-volume military record of the war that is much esteemed by historians. In 1780 in Philadelphia, Esther DeBerdt Reed argued in Sentiments of an American Woman for both the revolution and for women's right to participate in it. Other Philadelphia women joined her in raising substantial money to support the rebel army. Her political leadership is particularly striking in view of the fact that she was a British native who hadn't lived in America for very long.

George Washington appreciated the activism of these natural democrats and wrote thank-you notes to many women. He also took time to formally accept poetry from Phillis Wheatley, a young black woman born in Gambia, who was sold into slavery at a very young age. Her first book, Poems on Various Subjects, was published in London in 1773, the same year she was emancipated by the Wheatley family of Boston.

New Ideas in a New Nation

Books sold during the nineteenth century in numbers that seem astonishing today. The reason, of course, was that people spent much more time reading than now. There were no movies, televisions, or phones to distract, and in a largely rural nation, theaters and opera houses usually were beyond traveling distance. Clergymen often frowned on card playing, and other games were rare. A few families owned pianos, and singing was treasured entertainment, but when people wanted to relax at the end of the day, most had no option but to open a book.

Even for women whose days did not end when the sun went down, it was not uncommon to enjoy a book in the evening: A woman merely picked up her darning or knitting and continued to work while her husband read aloud by the fireside. Even in the daylight, some women worked out systems whereby an older child read aloud while she did her kitchen work. Mothers, in fact, were the most likely teachers of reading, and American literacy owes more to them than is acknowledged.

Free public education was slow to develop, and the urban women who ran "dame schools" supported themselves by charging tuition. A few families, especially in the plantation South, employed governesses, but most teaching was done mother to child. When their children became teens, affluent families sent boys to prep schools or colleges to be taught exclusively by male professors. Privileged girls went to finishing schools, where the faculty could be male or female.

But mostly readers taught each other. Laws in the South made it a crime to teach an enslaved person to read, but some nonetheless learned by absorbing words and text they were sometimes exposed to — or because a master or mistress found that households ran more efficiently if a slave could recognize rudimentary words. Trusted (male) slaves even became preachers capable of reading at least parts of the Bible. Women and men in the new nation were readers, and the percentage of the middle-class population who bought books puts today's publishing market to shame.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Foreword, by Blanche Wiesen Cook 8

Letter from the WNBA President:

A Century of Progress for Women in the World of Books 10

Preface 12

Chapter 1: Women, Literary Pursuits, and the Book World:

Milestones and Trends 16

Colonial and Revolutionary America 18

New Ideas in a New Nation 19

The Post–Civil War Years 28

The Progressive Era 36

The Interwar Years 55

World War II and the Postwar World 74

The Era of Second Wave Feminism 94

A Networked World, A Fast-Changing World 117

Notes on Sources, Doris Weatherford 141

Notes on Sources, Rosalind Reisner 149

Chapter 2: Bookselling Then and Now 156

“Bookselling as a Profession for Women,” Reprint of 1926

Article by Madge Jenison 159

Response to Jenison’s Article by Joyce Meskis 166

A Quiz for Bookwomen, from The Bookwoman 170

Bookwomen Speak About Bookselling 173

Chapter 3: From the Archives 176

The Founding Story 177

The Early Dinners 180

The WNBA Takes on the Status of Women in the

Publishing Industry 184

Male Reaction to Women in the Publishing Industry 187

Publishing and Literature Courses Offered

by the WNBA 190

Chapter 4: Supporting Literature and Literacy 194

The WNBA and the United Nations 197

The WNBA Award 203

The WNBA Pannell Award 208

The Eastman Grant 210

National Reading Group Month and Great Group

Reads—Celebrating the Joy of Shared Reading 210

The WNBA National Writing Contest 216

The Afghan Women’s Writing Project and the Afghan 217

Friends Network Affiliation,

WNBA San Francisco Chapter

Marking Milestones and Honoring Women’s Voices 221

The WNBA Second Century Prize Honoring Little

Free Library 224

Chapter 5: WNBA Chapter Histories 226

Appendices 254

WNBA Presidents 255

WNBA Award Winners 258

WNBA Pannell Award Winners 261

WNBA Writing Contest Winners 266

Contributors and Credits 269

Acknowledgments and Supporters 278

Index 283

Editorial Reviews

01/29/2018
Publishing veteran Tomaselli and librarian Reisner spearhead a host of contributors to this informative reference work, which celebrates both the 2017 centennial of the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) and, more generally, the role of women in American publishing since the country’s founding. As with much of women’s history, women’s influence on the book business has been largely unheralded, the authors write. Their aim is to correct that with a chronology that touches on the stories of the famous (legendary Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham), the semi-famous (librarian Nancy Pearl, who inspired her own action figure). and the lesser known (Zitkala-Sa, a Lakota woman who was editor of American Indian Magazine in the late 19th century). In addition, entire primary source documents are included, among them a quiz from a 1938 issue of The Bookwoman, the association’s newsletter, that asked bookshop employees and owners questions such as “What is the wisest thing to do with an author who repeatedly offers to autograph her books—which you never stock?” (Partial answer: “I am just not able to keep your books in stock...”) Literary researchers will find a treasure trove of material here. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

“Brilliantly written and researched . . . . every page is filled with surprises, enchantments, and exciting new information of significance.”

— From the foreword by Blanche Wiesen Cook, biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt

I felt enormously proud as I read this book. It’s well-written and wonderfully researched and it made my heart sing. Reading about the ways women have been part of our literary heritage from the beginning was fascinating and inspiriting. It made me realize how brave and determined these women were, how energetic, how indefatigable . . .Brava to women booksellers, and to all the other women who have been so invaluable to the culture of books in this country. And brava to the WNBA for producing this marvelous volume.

— Roxana Robinson, author (Sparta, 2014) and former head of Author’s Guild

The American world of books would have been poor indeed without the many significant contributions women have made throughout our country’s relatively short history. It is so good to have them gathered together and brought to life in this excellent book. Congratulations to WNBA, and may this vital organization flourish and prosper for at least another hundred years!

— Deirdre Bair, biographer Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Becket, and others

From the Publisher