Women, Reading, and Cultural Authority: Some Implications of the Audience Perspective in Cultural Studies

Abstract

thousands-of groups of middle-class women gather every month in members' homes to discuss books. They show in action how at least one sector of the reading public responds to the economic power of the modern book industry and to the cultural authority of the critical establishment. Such groups have existed at least since young women of Charlestown, Massachusetts, began meeting in 1813 to discuss The Iliad, issues of The Spectator, and other serious poetry and nonfiction.' The number of book discussion groups grew at the turn of the century, when they were associated with the women's club movement. Progressive Era women's reform groups in Texas often evolved from literary societies or book groups, and even now some reading groups are linked to organizations like the American Association of University Women. In fact, a few relatively upper-class book groups in Texas have been meeting continuously since the late nineteenth century. One in Houston, for instance, celebrated its one-hundredth anniversary in March, 1985. Most groups, however, are composed of middle- and upper middle-class women, and none of the five groups I have observed is more than twenty-five years old. Despite their long history and contemporary pervasiveness, women's reading groups have been almost invisible to the world of scholarship, in part because they are leisure-time groups that function within the private or domestic sphere. Moreover, they are grass-roots voluntary organizations whose structure and history varies. Because of this they are hard to locate, and demand a flexible ethnographic approach rather than, or perhaps in addition to, standardized surveys and interviews like those administered by sociologist James Allan Davis and his associates at the National Opinion Research Center when they studied the centrally run Great Books adult reading group program.2 Finally, most women's reading groups are not feminist groups, so they do not have the fascinating quality of organizations spearheading social change. Nonetheless, these groups