
Organizing Women
Home, Work, and the Institutional Infrastructure of Print in Twentieth-Century America
$203.13
- Hardcover
272 pages
- Release Date
30 October 2022
Summary
In the first decades of the twentieth century, print-centered organizations spread rapidly across the United States, providing more women than ever before with opportunities to participate in public life. While most organizations at the time were run by and for white men, women—both Black and white—were able to reshape their lives and their social worlds through their participation in these institutions.
Organizing Women traces the histories of middle-class women—rural and ur…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781625346919 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1625346913 |
| Author: | Christine Pawley |
| Publisher: | University of Massachusetts Press |
| Imprint: | University of Massachusetts Press |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 272 |
| Release Date: | 30 October 2022 |
| Weight: | 363g |
| Dimensions: | 25mm x 151mm x 230mm |
| Series: | Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book |

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Critics Review
“This is a long-overdue study of the ways in which social organizations used informal print–e.g., newsletters, ephemera, bibliographies–and how such organizations provided women an exit from the social expectations of Victorian domesticity in the modern era. Readers will find many threads and tangents leading from these experiences to other significant elements of female life during the first third of the 20th century. Anyone conducting research on African American studies, literacy, or mass-market communication for the period should consider this book seriously.”–R. L. Saunders, CHOICE
“This ambitious, deeply researched book shows not only the important gains pioneered by these women but also their failures and limitations. Pawley expertly and engagingly explains the evolution of libraries and librarianship, revealing how print culture, and especially library work, both stifled and empowered women.”–Nancy C. Unger, author of Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History
“Organizing Women succeeds impressively in achieving its goals by blending print culture and women’s history. It builds on library history, particularly the literature on public libraries, by emphasizing the role women played in the ‘infrastructure’ of print.”–James J. Connolly, coauthor of What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City
Christine Pawley
CHRISTINE PAWLEY is professor emerita at the Information School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America.
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