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 study 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 perceived as a symbol of freedom? How did a love of literature awaken ambitions and imagination? Classicist philologist Edith Hamilton and physician Alice Hamilton grew up surrounded by books. The religion of the family of Martha Carey Thomas forbade reading; however, books became her main passion — her greatest pleasure and temptation. African American Ida Bell Wells was born into slavery, and her ability to handle words became her ticket to the world as an educator and journalist. Historian and gender studies expert Barbara Zieherman offers a new perspective on the book and intellectual culture of the Gilded Age and the remarkable women who created it. In her work, Zieherman deeply examines the role of literature in the fates of women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — their education, leisure, and reading circles. They frequented reading rooms for women and organized literary clubs, finding themselves through books — as intellectuals and educators, researchers and social reformers, changing the world.