Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired A Generation of American Women by Barbara Sicherman (review)

Barbara Sicherman’s Well-Read Lives is an important study of the impact of reading on young women growing up in the Gilded Age who departed from the traditional path of domesticity to lead lives as journalists, physicians, educators, and social reformers. Sicherman discusses the response of young women to Alcott’s Little Women. Whereas some modern critics interpret the novel as disciplining young women due to Jo’s marriage, the vast majority of young women read the book as opening up horizons for personal fulfillment. Differences in how individuals of different class and ethnic backgrounds read Little Women lead into a discussion of the different ways young women read literature. Lonely and ashamed of having “no school experience” (58), Florence Kelley read her father’s large library with apparently “neither joy nor enlightenment” (59). In contrast, Alice Stone Blackwell read voraciously with passion.

In the succeeding chapters, Sicherman explores the reading of specific women. She studies the Hamilton family, whose two most famous members were Edith Hamilton and her sister, Alice. What interests Sicherman here is reading as a family affair and how the family immersion in literature continued to connect them in their later lives and led to a “reciprocal relation . . . between fiction and life” (97). In contrast to this communal reading, M. Carey Thomas’s reading started out as a more individualistic endeavor. Burned severely as a child, Thomas developed her reading during a lengthy period of recovery. She emerged as a “Romantic Victorian” (111). After graduating from Cornell, Thomas and four friends from wealthy Baltimore families formed “Friday Night” where they shared their literary readings (they championed rebels like Shelley, Godwin, and Swinburne), their gender politics, and their friendship. There were limits to their rebelliousness, but clearly the spirit of rebellion led to self-definitions that spurred later careers.

Discussing Jane Addams, Sicherman explores the role of Addams’ early readings in solving her personal crisis and finding meaning in the establishment of Hull House. Ambiguous about “high culture,” Addams was afraid it divorced itself from the real life of social injustice. Her readings of Comte, Tolstoy, and George Eliot helped her see the possibilities of a meaningful life. Among Jewish immigrants, Mary Antin’s immersion in books served as an entrance into the American life she celebrated, while for Rose Cohen, books like David Copperfield helped her understand her social condition. Ida B. Wells, the subject of the final chapter, claimed that as a youth she had “never read a Negro book” (225). Her early readings included Alcott, Dickens, Bronte, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Sicherman says, however, that Wells had “no difficulty reading herself into the texts of white authors” (225). Certainly Shakespeare, whose passages Wells recited in Memphis lyceums in the early 1880s, contributed to her impressive oratorical style in her activist career as an anti-lynching crusader.

Using archives, diaries, and autobiographies, Sicherman is persuasive on the role of reading in shaping women’s lives during the Gilded Age and Progressive period. At the same time she understands that class, race, and gender intertwined with reading. She also persuasively argues that the literary culture of the late nineteenth century was a woman’s culture with opportunities for women authors and with the majority of readers being women. However, it is important to remember that the editors of the leading mass circulation magazines that women wrote for and consumed were all men, men who shared certain visions of literature and helped define the women’s literary culture and helped serve as arbiters of taste.