{"id":138,"date":"2010-11-18T09:58:41","date_gmt":"2010-11-18T14:58:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/watkinson.wp.trincoll.edu\/?p=138"},"modified":"2015-08-12T17:17:48","modified_gmt":"2015-08-12T17:17:48","slug":"women-and-their-books-in-the-19thc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/2010\/11\/18\/women-and-their-books-in-the-19thc\/","title":{"rendered":"Women and their books in the 19thC"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Last night we had a nice group of about 25-30 people at our event, sponsored by the Trinity College and Watkinson Library Associates: a\u00a0talk and book signing with Professor Emerita, Barbara Sicherman, in celebration of her book, Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I put up a small display of books that Dr. Sicherman discussed in her book–all first editions.\u00a0 Here they are (with one exception, all quotes are from Sicherman’s book):<\/p>\n

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Little Women<\/em><\/strong>, by Louisa May Alcott. (<\/strong>Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1868 (part I) and 1869 (part II)).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I read <\/em>Little Women a thousand times.\u00a0 Ten thousand. I am no longer incognito, not even to myself.\u00a0 I am Jo in her \u2018vortex;\u2019 not Jo exactly, but some Jo-of-the-future.\u00a0 I am under an enchantment: Who I truly am must be deferred, waited for and waited for. \u00a0\u00a0<\/em>\u2014Cynthia Ozick (1982)<\/p>\n

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\u201cAs a character readers imagined becoming, Jo promoted self-discovery, revealing hidden potentialities to those in the liminal state between childhood and adulthood.\u201d\u00a0 [15]\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>The Wide, Wide World<\/em><\/strong>, by Susan Bogert Warner [writing as Elizabeth Wetherell] (<\/strong>New York: G. P. Putnam, 1851). AND\u00a0 Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em><\/strong>, Life Among the Lowly<\/em>, by Harriet Beecher Stowe.\u00a0 (<\/strong>Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., 1852).<\/p>\n

\u201c[I]t was as fiction writers that women attained their greatest success.\u00a0 They not only wrote almost three quarters of the novels published in the United States by 1872, but were among the best-selling authors of the era.\u00a0 Beginning with Susan Warner\u2019s The Wide, Wide World<\/em> (1851), many \u201cwomen\u2019s novels\u201d sold more than 100,000 copies.\u00a0 Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> (1852), the best-selling novel of the century, sold an estimated 300,000 copies within the first year and half a million in the United States alone by the end of the fifth.\u00a0 Hawthorne\u2019s dig at the \u201cdamned mob of scribbling women\u201d was not just a manner of speaking, but a pained recognition of women\u2019s astonishing popularity\u2014and financial success\u2014in the field of literature.\u201d\u00a0 [39]<\/span><\/p>\n

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Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical Notes<\/em><\/strong>, by Jane Addams.\u00a0 (<\/strong>New York: The Macmillan Co., 1910).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cWhen Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr took up residence at 335 Halstead Street in Chicago in September 1889, they hoped that by sharing their lives with their mainly immigrant neighbors they would find ways to help bridge the gulf between the city\u2019s haves and have-nots . . . The women\u2019s initiative in founding one of the first settlement houses proved to be a harbinger of one of the great social movements of the age:\u00a0 by 1900, there were more than 100 settlements in the United States.\u201d\u00a0 [165]<\/p>\n

\u201cLike other institutions with a mission to improve the lives of the underprivileged, Hull-House became a sponsor of culture, a term used here to include educational and cultural ventures designed to extend the intellectual and social horizons of local inhabitants.\u00a0 The expansion of the original mansion to thirteen buildings occupying a full city block gave visual testimony to the settlement\u2019s cultural reach.\u00a0 At its peak it encompassed three formal theater groups, art and music schools, a women\u2019s symphony orchestra, a chorus of 500 \u2018working people,\u2019 and clubs of every description, not to mention girls\u2019 and boys\u2019 basketball teams.\u201d\u00a0 [166]<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, September 1909 to September 1929, with a Record of a Growing World Consciousness<\/em><\/strong>, by Jane Addams. (<\/strong>New York:\u00a0 The Macmillan Co., 1930).<\/p>\n

\u201cIn The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House<\/em> (1930), Jane Addams expressed puzzlement at the \u2018contrasts in a post-war generation,\u2019 including younger women\u2019s lack of interest in the social ideals that animated her contemporaries and the new emphasis on sex as the most important avenue for fulfillment.\u00a0 While it is true that young women no longer had the same sense of gender consciousness\u2014in its dual connotation of privilege and obligation\u2014that motivated many women of Addams\u2019s generation, they did not simply opt for exclusively private lives.\u00a0 But most were unwilling to make the choice between career and marriage that their predecessors took for granted.\u00a0 Fortified by the vote, and not much interested in female bonding, successive generations of women learned firsthand what the Progressive generation had assumed: that without institutional supports, career and motherhood were difficult to combine.\u201d\u00a0 [253]<\/p>\n

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Last night we had a nice group of about 25-30 people at our event, sponsored by the Trinity College and Watkinson Library Associates: a\u00a0talk and book signing with Professor Emerita, Barbara Sicherman, in celebration of her book, Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women. I put up a small display of books […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[50],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2072,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions\/2072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}