Intimate practices
Subtitle: literacy and cultural work in U.S. women's clubs, 1880-1920
By: Anne Ruggles Gere.
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Urbana
Language: eng
Number of pages: 367
Subjects: Women -- United States -- Societies and clubs -- History.; Women -- Books and reading -- United States -- History.; Women -- United States -- Intellectual life.; Self-culture -- United States -- History.
Description: Women's clubs at the turn of the century were numerous, dedicated to a number of issues, and crossed class, religious, and racial lines. Emphasizing the intimacy engendered by shared reading and writing in these groups, Anne Ruggles Gere contends that these literacy practices meant that club members took an active part in reinventing the nation during a period of major change. Gere uses archival material that documents club members' perspectives and activities around such issues as Americanization, womanhood, peace, consumerism, benevolence, taste, and literature and offers a rare depth of insight into the interests and lives of American women from the fin de sïcle through the beginning of the roaring twenties. Intimate Practices is unique in its exploration of a range of women's clubs -- Mormon, Jewish, white middle-class, African American, and working class -- and paints a vast and colorful multicultural, multifaceted canvas of these widely-divergent women's groups. - Publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 271-345) and index.
Table of contents: title: Literacy and intimacy; title: Constructing and contesting Americanization(s); title: Valuing and devaluing dollars; title: Fashioning American womanhood(s); title: (Re)calibrating culture; title: (Un)professional reading and writing; title: Images and public memory.