Bringing Up the Book

In a 1928 retrospective on children's departments in the U.S. publishing industry, Horn Book Magazine editor Bertha E. Mahony touts the domestic more so than the feminist implications of women's editing and appraising children's books. Mahony envisions the editorial and production offices, which she perceives as male domains, as sites for outreach to children by those with an alleged feminine instinct for it. She writes, apologetically at first,

We [at the Horn Book] do not mean to depreciate or minimize the splendid publishing of books which men have done but we do believe that men (with few exceptions) have been baffled and groping where children's books are concerned. . . . There seems every natural reason why women, properly qualified, should be particularly successful in the selection of children's books to publish and their publishing. When it comes to deciding upon the format of a book, it is more like dressing a little girl than anything else. One chooses every detail of her wardrobe in harmony with herself. So with a book, its size, type, style of printing, cover material and color of cover, book paper and jacket, manner of illustration—all should be selected to express the book itself. To this delightful task women would seem to bring particular interest and ability.

(Mahony 4–5)

By 1928, not just bookmen but "bookwomen" occupied a central place as creators and mediators in children's literature, altering the course of publishing. Mahony observes women, herself included, moving out of their socially sanctioned roles as secondary handlers of finished books (mothers, librarians, teachers, and also booksellers and critics like herself) and becoming editors with a key role in what gets published in the first place. Mahony looks back on a decade of women vetting promising manuscripts, supervising production, and critiquing finished works, yet softens her remarks by justifying this as "natural," in keeping with twenties debates around modern motherhood.

According to Mahony's statement, accomplished women fulfill a doting, maternal position in regard to the girlish book. This reasoning places the feminized children's text and the female editor squarely in a self-imposed nursery, even though the editor influences the production and consumption of the work, and the book circulates in the marketplace. Female author-illustrators, by association with bookwomen, might be understood as giving birth not to fine art or literary work, but marginalized, popular objects for domestic use. The reality, of course, was somewhere in between. Even if the text maintains a connection to the private space, the innocent (or uninformed), and the weak (in terms of a feminized child who cannot dress without assistance), the text also occupies the professional and public space as a desirable, saleable commodity. The children's text interpenetrates public and private, outside and domestic, and the woman as editor, librarian, and critic—or as author-illustrator—does the same.

According to Jacalyn Eddy, in her informative Bookwomen: Creating an Empire in Children's Book Publishing, 1919–1939, Mahony's analogy between "dressing a little girl" and book design "revealed the extent to which . . . cueing [that women were unfit for the business world] influenced her own thinking" (77). Mahony voices a backward opinion as far as contemporary readers are concerned, yet she represents a great success in 1910s bookselling—with the Boston Bookshop for Boys and Girls—and 1920s–'30s promotion of children's literature, via the Horn Book Magazine and other review periodicals. In Bookwomen, Eddy profiles and gauges the achievements of Mahony (who became Bertha Mahony Miller when she married in 1932), and her industry colleagues Anne Carroll Moore of the New York Public Library; Alice Jordan of the Boston Public Library; editor Louise Seaman (later Louise Seaman Bechtel), of Macmillan Co.; editor May Massee, first of Doubleday, then of Viking Press; and Elinor Whitney (later Elinor Whitney Field), Mahony's second-in-command at the Boston Book Shop and for Horn Book publications like the massive bibliography Realms of Gold in Children's Books (1930).

Eddy's...