Reading Women - Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800
Book description
In 1500, as many as 99 out of 100 English women may have been
illiterate, and girls of all social backgrounds were the objects of
purposeful efforts to restrict their access to full literacy. Three
centuries later, more than half of all English and Anglo-American
women could read, and the female reader was emerging as a cultural
ideal and a market force. While scholars have written extensively
about women's reading in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and
about women's writing in the early modern period, they have not
attended sufficiently to the critical transformation that took place
as female readers and their reading assumed significant cultural and
economic power.
Reading Women brings into conversation the latest scholarship
by early modernists and early Americanists on the role of gender in
the production and consumption of texts during this expansion of
female readership. Drawing together historians and literary scholars,
the essays share a concern with local specificity and material
culture. Removing women from the historically inaccurate frame of
exclusively solitary, silent reading, the authors collectively return
their subjects to the activities that so often coincided with reading:
shopping, sewing, talking, writing, performing, and collecting. With
chapters on samplers, storytelling, testimony, and translation, the
volume expands notions of reading and literacy, and it insists upon a
rich and varied narrative that crosses disciplinary boundaries and
national borders.
"Reading Women . . . generously offers important new
historical, textual, and theoretical ways of accessing, describing,
and interpreting early modern women's reading."-Journal of
American History
Heidi Brayman Hackel is Associate Professor of English at University
of California, Riverside and the author of Reading Material in Early
Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy. Catherine E. Kelly is
Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and author
of In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women's Lives in the Nineteenth
Century.
