Life Between the Lines: Books, Letters, Diaries, and the Fates of Women

Girls and women of the Gilded Age found and lost themselves in books. Reading was education and play, discipline and liberation, intellectual pleasure and inspiration for creativity, escapism and a way to spend time with family. How did reading become a cultural way of life, and how did the novel "Little Women" become a rite of passage for a whole generation of teenage girls? Why were libraries regarded as a symbol of freedom? How did the love for literature awaken ambitions and imagination? Classicist philologist Edith Hamilton and physician Alice Hamilton grew up surrounded by books. The religion of the Martha Carey Thomas family forbade reading, yet books became her main passion - her greatest pleasure and temptation. African American Ida Bell Wells was born into slavery, and her ability to wield words became her ticket into the world as an educator and journalist. Historian and gender studies specialist Barbara Zieherman offers a new perspective on the literary and intellectual culture of the Gilded Age and on the remarkable women who created it. In her work, Zieherman deeply explores the role of literature in the fates of women at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century - their education, leisure, and reading circles. They attended reading rooms for women and opened them, organized literary circles, and through books found themselves - as intellectuals and educators, researchers and social reformers, changing the world.