The Woman Reader by Belinda Jack

In her introduction to The Woman Reader, Belinda Jack writes that although there are a number of excellent histories of reading, “there is no history of women’s reading to date. . . . [W]e write the books that we write because we cannot find them elsewhere” (18). In fact, there have been excellent historical accounts of women’s reading (for example, Kate Flint’s The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 [1993], Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley’s collection Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present [2005], and Heidi Bryman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly’s edited volume Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World,1500–1800 [2008]), as well as numerous studies of women (or gender) and reading. But these works have been historically, culturally, and thematically circumscribed. What distinguishes Jack’s book is its claim to present a “complete history” that “travels from pre-historic caves to the digital bookstores of today, exploring how and what women have read through the ages and across cultures and civilizations” (dust jacket).

Across this vast expanse of time and space, Jack finds that “the story of the woman reader has a certain coherence.” The plot is familiar: “Women’s access to the written word has been a particular source of anxiety for men—and indeed some women—almost from the very beginning. Through the centuries there have been many and various attempts to control [women’s] literacy and access to reading material and, of course, counterforces, such as the vigorous individual and collective campaigns to promote women’s literacy and free access to books” (1). It is also not surprising, particularly in patriarchal cultures, that women’s reading has been strongly associated with the danger of sexual license. In spite of the obstacles, women, as readers, have become as skilled and avid as (if not more so than) men. For women as for men, literacy is essential to education; education is foundational to individual freedom and social and political equality.

The second half of The Woman Reader goes over the same ground covered by the books mentioned above. The first half covers everything before. The first chapter, about the emergence of reading and writing on clay tablets in 4000 BCE in Mesopotamia, through Greek and Roman antiquity, offers tantalizing bits of information. The “first author known to have signed a work was a woman,” the Sumerian Princess Enheduanna, born around 2300 BCE. In the essentially oral cultures of antiquity, authors composed orally, dictating their compositions to scribes, and listened as scribes read the compositions of others. Actual reading and writing were mainly the province of scribes who were rigorously trained in the management of the cumbersome materials and technology of the time. Of the 185 scribes named in records of the Babylonian city of Sittar between 1850 and 1550 BCE, 14 were women.

Of course, until the nineteenth century, literacy belonged only to a very small minority—less than 1 percent in 1500, rising to almost half in 1800—of the population. In the middle ages, a small number of women—aristocrats, members of religious orders, and tradeswomen—were literate. The cloistered life, in particular, gave women access to a life devoted to reading, writing, and thinking. Jack describes the life of a number of exemplary scholars: Radegund of Germany, St. Darerca and Brigit of Ireland, Hilda of Northumbria, and Hildegard of Bingen.

Diaries, letters, records of gifts, purchases, bequests, and writers’ dedications show evidence of women’s relationship to books. However, the story of women reading inevitably becomes conflated with the story of women writing—information about what and how they read being deduced from what they have written. Thus, we have the stories of Marie of France, Elizabeth of Hungary, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and others—members of a group whose numbers increased rapidly as the vernacular replaced Latin as the language of written communication.

Particularly intriguing is the role reading and writing women played in the Reformation, especially the case of Anne Askew, a friend and protégé of Katherine Parr, one of the wives of Henry VIII. Parr and Askew wrote two of only three known Protestant confessions of faith written by a woman. Katherine met with friends and religious women at court for readings of the Bible and discussions of church reform. As these discussions eventually drew the hostility of Henry and others, Anne became a particular target. She was accused of and tried for heresy and treason, tortured, and burnt at the stake on July 16, 1546, at the age of twenty-five. Jack writes about the handling of Askew’s interrogations (on her rejection of the doctrine of transubstantiation) with great skill and courage. Eventually, she “was carried to her death in a chair, as she was no longer able to walk. . . . Those who witnessed her execution . . . were astonished by her bravery and reported that she remained silent until the flames reached her chest” (124).

To redeem the promise of a “complete” history “across cultures and civilizations,” Jack refers to women reading in eleventh-century Byzantium, in seventeenth-century Japan and China, and in modern day Teheran, among other periods and places. However, the usefulness of a history of women reading in nonwestern cultures presented apart from their specific historical and cultural contexts is clearly questionable. In Jack’s references, “other” cultures show up only to the extent that they can be fitted into the Eurocentric account and serve primarily to prove the generalizability claimed for the European story.

There is another problem. The “coherence” imputed to the story of women’s reading “through the ages and across cultures and civilizations” derives from the premise of the universality of patriarchy. But what if patriarchy is not necessarily universal or the same in its essential features across all cultures? Even today, some modern cultures retain very important elements of their relatively gender-egalitarian, precolonial roots (e.g., some Native American cultures, the Minangkabaw of Sumatra, my own native Philippine culture). What shape would the story of women reading take apart from the premise of the universality of patriarchy or male-dominance?

Jack rightly laments that references to women are peripheral to the “general” histories of reading. Her book serves to supply what is lacking: the story of women’s struggle to acquire equal access to literacy and its social and political benefits. Unfortunately, this story, as important as it is, accepts the generality of androcentric histories: it assumes that if women had been equal to men, the general histories of reading would have been an accurate representation of their activities and their experiences. However, what if we do a Hegelian inversion and take women’s reading as paradigmatic of reading in general? What insights would this yield? What features of reading as a human activity would show up if we begin with what women do and with the way reading functions in their lives? What features of the reading experience and behavior of human beings, discounted and obscured in androcentric accounts, would gain significance in histories that privilege women’s experience?

Jack includes many artistic representations of women reading: a first-century fresco from Pompeii showing a girl reading a scroll under the supervision of her mother, funerary images of women holding or reading scrolls, various images of the Annunciation featuring Mary reading, and various images associating reading with sexual indulgence. Two of these images—a Self-Portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola (1554) and The Precious Book by Gwen John (1926)—suggest answers to the questions raised above. Jack comments that Anguissola uses the book as a vehicle for the assertion of authorship: the small book she is holding is open to a page that reads, “I Sofonisba, a virgin, made this, 1554.” However, equally arresting is her frank unsmiling face, dominated by eyes boldly staring at the viewer. John’s painting shows a seated woman absorbed in reading a book. Jack notes that the tantalizing questions raised by the title—What is being read? In what way is it precious?—are left unanswered by the picture. Jack connects John’s picture to the “passion for reading” and the “ambiguity, variety and richness . . . [that] characterize modern women’s reading experiences.”

These two pictures, and others like them, make me think of Rodin’s male figure in The Thinker, perhaps the most well-known iconic figure of human subjectivity. Anguissola’s and John’s paintings propose the female reader as the iconic figure of subjectivity and another rendition of the activity of thinking. Rodin portrays thinking as a solitary activity. The thinker is walled off from other thinkers; his body forms the boundary that separates the thinking subject from other subjectivities. In Anguissola’s picture, the inscription on the book presents the subject as first person, an “I,” the author of the work; the eyes are looking at an other—the reader who is expected to read the message inscribed in the book. In John’s painting, the subject, the reader, is in the role of the second person, the “you” who is the addressee of the book. The reader is engrossed in a book written by another. I would suggest that the figure of the woman reader in these two paintings (and others like it) offers an alternative representation of the thinker as a subject intently engaged with another subjectivity. A history of reading based on the woman reader has the potential to enhance our appreciation of the centrality of intersubjectivity in all human experiences.