Bookwomen: Creating an Empire in Children’s Book Publishing, 1919–1939

3. Selling Books: Bookshops, the WEIU, and Bertha Everett Mahony

W hile the struggle for female professional identity took place in formal cultural institutions like the library, a similar process was underway in women’s social organizations. The club movement of the late nineteenth century developed a new agenda for dealing with a long-recognized problem: women’s economic and intellectual dependence on men. To engage effectively with these problems, women’s organizations sought to manipulate urban landscapes by undertaking activities geared toward self-improvement and designed to strengthen women’s relationship to the workplace. This was no simple rhetoric; clubs assisted women by offering employment bureaus, childcare centers, vocational training, and financial backing for causes deemed significant. Clubs also provided leisure activities for members that must be seen as both supportive and simultaneously intrusive, particularly where a class gap existed between leaders and the rank and file. Nonetheless, club culture offered access to invaluable networks with a range of benefits, including financial support, political voice, social vision, and friendship. In the early twentieth century, however, women’s organizations frequently remained closely tied to the service ideal. Attempts to reconcile these beliefs—economic autonomy and voluntary service—presented challenges to club members resembling those faced by library women. As in the library, clubwomen sometimes appropriated the traditional image of women as nurturers in order to achieve their goals. Like librarians, clubwomen brought private qualities to public space, but these qualities represented far more than a “home away from home.” While cooperation with the gender line was advantageous in some cases, cooperation with the 49 c h a p t e r 3 Selling Books Bookshops, the WEIU, and Bertha Everett Mahony public/private line was not as forthcoming. Bertha Mahony’s career provides a classic illustration both of the tensions that arose from balancing voluntarism and professionalism, and of the lasting influence of women’s organizations on their members. During the summer of 1919, while Anne Carroll Moore and Alice Jordan prepared for Children’s Book Week, Bertha Everett Mahony was in Boston overseeing the construction of a large, custom-made vehicle known as the Book Caravan. Painted gray with its name lettered in orange along the sides, the Caravan was not, Mahony insisted, a lending library but rather a bookstore on wheels, able to carry some twelve hundred volumes at a time.1 Mahony had hatched the idea as part of a community outreach program , designed to bring books to children in towns lacking ready access to libraries and bookshops.2 The Caravan was to be an extension of her Boston-based business, the Bookshop for Boys and Girls, in operation since 1916. Like Moore and Jordan, Mahony was a native New Englander. Born on March 13, 1882, in Rockport, Massachusetts, she was part of a close-knit family and a ninth-generation American on her mother’s side. Her father, Daniel, was a passenger agent and telegraph operator at the train station in Rockport and a second-generation Irish Catholic, although he attended the Congregational Church with his wife and children. He was also a passionate lover of poetry. Three siblings followed Bertha: Daniel in 1884, George Everett in 1885, and Ruth Ellen in 1887. Their mother, Mary, was an accomplished musician who served as the town’s piano teacher and gave lessons to her older daughter. She was an enthusiastic storyteller, in the habit of chanting nursery rhymes and fairy tales to her children, as well as telling them stories about her own childhood in New London, Connecticut. Filled with music, stories, and a small library, the Mahony household seems to have influenced the child’s development substantially, and Mahony could read before her fifth birthday. The Mahony women, especially, exerted a powerful influence over the children, providing the girls with an early and strong sense of female community. When Bertha was eleven, her mother, frequently ill, died. The loss was devastating to the child. Graduating from high school at nineteen, Mahony entered the normal school at Gloucester. In 1902, after one year, she moved to Boston to attend the School of Secretarial Studies at the brand new Simmons College. She would have preferred to attend the School of Library Science there, but lack of funds prevented her from doing so. Simmons offered two program options at the secretarial school: a four-year course of study or, for college 50 selling books graduates, a one-year...