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  • Bookwomen: Creating an Empire in Children’s Book Publishing, 1919–1939
  • Anne Lundin (bio)
Bookwomen: Creating an Empire in Children’s Book Publishing, 1919–1939. By Jacalyn Eddy. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.

Years ago in a course on the History of the Book, the professor began class by quoting from Gustave Flaubert's review of Hippolyte Taine's History of English Literature; Flaubert wrote that it was high time we rid ourselves of the absurd notion that books dropped like meteorites from the sky. Somehow in the scholarly privileging of the life histories and textual adventures of celebrated authors and classic works, scholars in the field of children's literature have largely perpetuated that notion, slighting the pivotal role of publishers and librarians in the transmission of books to readers. In a keynote address at a 1999 annual Children's Literature Association conference at Calgary, Jack Zipes called for the field to question the evaluative processes by which we value children's literature, which would include a study of the role of "white, educated, middle-class women" in selecting the reading matter for the young in the institutions of publishing, schools, libraries, and universities—"a social history that has yet to be written" (69). This story is beginning to be told. To cite a few examples: book historian and critic Leonard Marcus inspires interest in editors like Ursula Nordstrom, whose collection of letters, Dear Genius, reveals the powerful agency of this Harper editor (1940–73) in shaping classic works by authors like E. B. White and Maurice Sendak; Beverly Lyon Clark in Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America highlights the nexus of cultural production and reception of books in American culture, revealing the untold story of the librarian as guardian and nurturer of the literature; and Kenneth Kidd explores the nuances of prizing through a case study of the Newbery Medal. My own work centers on the complex of interests of librarians and academics in claiming a sense of place.

Seeing this "neglected slice of literary life" (14), American studies scholar Jacalyn Eddy brings her considerable skills as an historian to telling a story of six significant "bookwomen" instrumental in the field of children's book publishing in the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s. The scope includes biographical studies of two librarians, Anne Carroll Moore and Alice Jordan; two editors, Louise Seaman Bechtel and May Massee; and two booksellers and founders of the Horn Book magazine, Bertha Mahony and Elinor Whitney Field. The author positions these women within a larger frame of progressive ideals of childhood and society that emboldened women of a certain class to become bookwomen, a departure from the traditional male bastion of publishing [End Page 402] and librarianship. These women were part of a gendered discourse on women in the workplace, with emerging professional opportunities in bookselling, book editing, journalism, and librarianship. Eddy shows how these ambitious women achieved professional identity in these new fields now opening or expanding opportunities to women and within the cultural debate over the "naturalness" of working women in career positions. Theirs was a delicate balance between old and new in a cultural debate of traditional and evolving ideas about women, children, and reading. They conformed to ideological notions and then challenged these norms in a fluid reconfiguration of professional space. The heart of the matter was the conflict between social stability versus social change, in which bookwomen struggled to realize their liberal faith in a conservation of values.

Eddy proceeds chronologically to tell her story of expanding empire. Eddy uses this charged term to convey the breadth of influence of their conjoined efforts in bringing children's books to the marketplace of ideas and commodities. I see the sense of empire here not as an imperial moment but rather a matrix of forces and counterforces. Children's librarians, a feminized profession developing in the 1890s, were, by default, given province over children's literature, a subject considered appropriate for women, whose natural instincts were assumed to be authoritative. The shaping of the field in this direction led children's librarians to become formative figures in the publishing world, wielding power...

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