Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America

Chapter 7: Women, Print, and Domesticity

205 7 Women, Print, and Domesticity E Flo never went to bed without setting the lamp carefully on a chair beside her and laying at least six cumbersome volumes where she could reach them. She might read only one, but she would not run the risk of finishing that one and finding herself bookless. Kathleen Norris, The Venables If for Door Peninsula schoolchildren, the bookmobile’s visits generated a party-like atmosphere, their mothers, too, found visiting the library could be the high spot of the week. Not only did it provide them with a constantly changing supply of books and magazines to take home, but it gave them an opportunity to socialize with neighbors as well. A bookmobile stop could last anywhere from a half hour to two hours, and during that time neighbors might greet each other for the first time since the previous library visit. “In the wintertime [it] was nothing for Mrs. Jones to pick up Mrs. Smith: ‘Oh we’ll all go to the library.’ They all went in one car—car pooled it,” remembered former bookmobile driver Bob H. Women’s charges account for over 90 percent of the surviving adult reading records, and over two-thirds of these women patrons were rural residents who either used the bookmobile service at its crossroad, school, or village stops or borrowed from the small village libraries. Probably their lives conformed to what seems still to have been a common pattern for rural married women at the time: an endless series of farm and domestic chores that included child care, gardening, cooking, cleaning, perhaps still caring for poultry and milking, and laundry—though some, it seems, drew the line at making soap. Women’s experiences of the library inter-  Interview with Hazel P., Door County, 24 May 200. 206฀ Women, Print, and Domesticity sected with their experiences of other institutions that promoted reading , especially the women’s and homemakers’ clubs that constituted women’s primary secular social organizations in the postwar period. Women’s and Homemakers’ Clubs Northern Door County had cultural experiences and aspirations, interviewees told me, that were foreign to the “practical” south. The north’s reputation as a region of readers was confirmed by the fact that in addition to the Sturgeon Bay Public Library (housed in its purposebuilt Carnegie building), several other Door County communities had small libraries of their own. Kewaunee County, by contrast had only two—in the cities of Algoma and Kewaunee. Some of the Door County village libraries had been founded by local women’s clubs, and during the period before they joined the Door-Kewaunee Regional Library were what Jane Livingston dubbed “token libraries”—libraries with limited opening hours, limited collections, and run by volunteers or untrained staff. Still, they were much better than nothing, Livingston felt, and represented considerable effort on the part of their organizers, many of whom were women’s club members. Women’sclubswereanorthernphenomenon,accordingtoLivingston. “They don’t have women’s clubs down in southern Door, they just have [extension service] Homemakers—practical,” she said, implying a class difference between the north and the south. Unlike southern women, whose lives were circumscribed by domestic expectations and obligations , northern women were less likely to be confined to their homes and could engage with the community in significant ways, especially through their women’s clubs. In Sister Bay, the largest village in the north of Door County, Livingston said, “the women’s club . . . collected books from anyone who wanted to contribute. They had a library in a room at the side of their village hall. These village halls were pretty good-sized, they had an auditorium.” In Ephraim, summer visitors spurred the founding of the library. “There were . . . dynamic people in Ephraim and these people all met and talked with each other,” remembered Lee Traven, son of librarian Olivia Traven. Summer visitors donated books to the Ephraim library, which were kept in the village hall in the summer Women, Print, and Domesticity฀ 207 and in the barber’s shop in the winter. In the village of Bailey’s Harbor, on the other hand, philanthropy played a key role in establishing a library. A local benefactor, Michael McCardle, who was chief executive officer of the Sunbeam Corporation, left money to build a village hall, one room of which was to be a local library. “This man [McCardle] worked . . . with the Rockefeller Foundation,” Lee Traven related, “and...