How women invented book clubs, revolutionizing reading and their own lives

How women invented book clubs, revolutionizing reading and their own lives

Mar 27 2021

The women met wherever they could get their hands on a few books and some quiet: in empty classrooms, backrooms of bookstores, at friend’s homes, even while working in mills.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the first American reading circles — a precursor to book clubs — required little more than a thirst for literature and a desire to discuss it with like-minded women.

Journalist Margaret Fuller held one session of what she called her “conversations” in 1839, likely in her sister’s rented room on Chauncey Place, a few blocks from Boston Common.

Fuller — the first American female war correspondent, a magazine editor and an all-around feminist renegade — saw her club as anything but a substitute for embroidery. Instead, she rallied women who were, as she wrote: “desirous to answer the great questions. What were we born to do? How shall we do it?”

As one attendee recounted, Fuller “opened the book of life and helped us to read it for ourselves.”

Fuller’s “conversations,” much like many literary circles, were a way for women to pursue truth, knowledge and an understanding of themselves and the world around them. Megan Marshall, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “Margaret Fuller: A New American Life,” compared those meetings to consciousness raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s. “There was a sense of female power that was emanating from these sessions,” Marshall said.

Women may have been excluded from philosophical clubs and universities, but they found other ways of engaging with literature. Women’s chief role in founding the modern book club — a consequence of being marginalized from other intellectual spaces — has gone on to shape the book landscape in profound and unappreciated ways...

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