There’s no use in avoiding the topic that has taken over the news in the last year: the revelations that sexual harassment is a common occurrence for women. It can prevent women from moving forward in their careers and lives and it’s a phenomenon that’s ingrained in a number of cultures, making women an underclass. The result of the squelching of women is that we all lose the benefits of their contributions. I feel similarly about lack of opportunities for both men and women who live in places and cultures where they are denied opportunities. We are a much poorer society for those losses.
Women in the Literary Landscape tells the stories of women who succeeded, not the women who didn’t. Would the book have been more expansive if women hadn’t had to overcome so many obstacles? Is there another book to be written about the talented women who failed to achieve their ambitions or never made the attempt? _Probably yes to both those questions, but we didn’t write that book. So here’s another great story from the book that we did write, about young women who were exploited by factory owners but made time to educate themselves, write, and support each other.
“Women from all classes of society were hungry for education and culture. The textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, would seem an unlikely place for an educational movement to develop, but there was an intense desire for intellectual stimulation among the women mill workers. Thousands of young, unmarried women, most between the ages of fifteen and thirty, but some even younger, were recruited from New England farms and lived in boardinghouses, often working thirteen hours a day at their looms. But in winter, work was limited to the briefer daylight hours, and many used this leisure to learn by candlelight. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s they formed study clubs, read serious nonfiction, learned foreign languages, and attended lectures and cultural events. They even published the magazines Factory Girl, Operative Magazine, and Voice of Industry, allowing their ideas for better working conditions to circulate among the New England textile mills.
“One of the most articulate of the mill women was Lucy Larcom, who began working in Lowell when she was eleven years old. During her ten years in the mills, she wrote poems, songs, and letters describing her life, some of which were published in the Lowell Offering, a monthly literary magazine. She went on to teach at the Wheaton Female Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts, and helped found the Rushlight Literary Magazine, a student literary magazine still in existence. From 1865 to 1873 she was an editor at Our Young Folks, one of the first magazines for children. Her poems were widely published in her lifetime. One of Larcom’s most significant contributions was a memoir, A New England Girlhood, which is still an important resource for historians. The nostalgic memoir and her 1881 article in The Atlantic Monthly, “Among Lowell Mill Girls,” are worth reading in any era.”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the countercultural movement, in its anti-establishment wisdom, pushed librarians to question library-work-as-usual. For example, librarians began to investigate–and change–the way things were named in our catalogs, making subject headings more authentic and relevant. (Now, of course, keyword searching, tags, and other techniques have made all that head-banging work almost irrelevant.) Since the library profession is largely female, Second Wave Feminism shook things up as well.
Last week I wrote about the book I co-authored, Women in the Literary Landscape, which contains an overview of the role of women in various fields related to books. One of the joys of doing the research was discovering Madge Jenison, known as a “minor novelist” and the co-owner of the Sunwise Turn Bookshop, which opened in New York City in 1915. Madge wrote a memoir about her bookselling experiences, called Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling. Her personality shines through on every page: warm, buoyant, idealistic and exuding positive energy. Jenison felt that putting the right book in the hands of the right reader might just save the world. One of my favorite lines from the memoir is, “Books– do I made too much of them?”
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