Blog for Oct. 25th

Reflections and Questions upon Reading Richard D. Brown's "The Revolution's Legacy for the History of the Book"

One of Brown's opening assertions is that, "only an informed citizenry could properly identify and repel threats to liberty" (58) leaves me wondering how WOMEN were able to fulfill their part as de facto citizens. Obviously, it was through reading, as Brown points out that women were able to become "informed" so they could "identify and repel threats to liberty" -- and yet not all women had access to print and print culture. There were exceptional cases, as Mary Kelley points out, in the lives of women such as Polly Warner (who received a 155-volume library from England for her 16th birthday in 1765). This leads me to ask how were women, especially the elite classes, able to gain access? Even though Brown does not attempt to answer this question, it is one that niggled at the back of my mind while reading his chapter in An Extensive Republic.

Brown does point out that, "Women and girls read extensively to become fit wives and mothers to citizens" (71) -- not a new idea for those of us who have read books about Republican Motherhood (such as Sarah Robbins' Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women's Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century and Mary Beth Norton's Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800). They read, according to Brown, the Bible and "other religious works" along with periodicals, "compendia, and textbooks" (71).

This is a good summary of the scholarship out there about white women's reading practices in the privileged classes of the Early Republic. But Brown overlooks obvious texts that would have been crucial in formulating women's reading AND writing practices -- letters, diaries, and cookbooks. He doesn't mention poetry either. All these texts were in circulation. Maybe he leaves them out of his discussion because he is focused on the public (male) sphere of information and print culture. But I would argue, along with other feminist scholars, that accounts written in "private" forms like letters and diaries were considered "public" by the women who wrote and read them. But perhaps Brown does not consider them "public" because they weren't printed for mass consumption like newspapers were?

I really appreciate Brown's points about women and his including them in the discussion of the history of the book, but his chapter leaves me with so many more questions. For instance, if women were to, as part of an educated citizenry, "identify and repel threats to liberty" there were caught in a double bind because they themselves were left out of the notion of citizens. Their own liberties were threatened by the practice of citizenship in the Early Republic. As merely the mothers and wives of citizens, they were merely a conduit of knowledge that marginalized their place in the republic. Or did they have a role that was fulfilling and important, but I haven't read enough yet or discovered the scholars who wrote about them? Is there a diary of a women reader hidden in an archive somewhere, detailing her own reading habits for herself -- and not to pass on to a man or boy? These questions are fascinating and I hope to find out their answers soon.