Reading Practices Of Women Research Articles

Socialising feminism and diversity: the use of gender in young female readers' literary attachments and exclusions

AbstractThis article discusses young women's reading practices and the social uses of literature for enabling gender equality that are present in those practices. Through a digital ethnography study where six young women collaborated as participants, I asked the data: How is literature, precisely its capacity to be used, conceived by young women readers in the search for gender equality? These women's reading engagements are tightly woven with a gender perspective. What are these readers embracing, and what are they rejecting by assuming a gender lens? By tracing these attachments and exclusions, I describe how books affect readers' perspectives and practices on their identities, their choice of authors, the cultural value of books, the social representations of books and reading as education. Participants' close and distant connections between the book and their desire for gender equality allow me to discuss the literature's pedagogical instrumentality and uselessness for achieving gender‐inclusive literacy. Finally, I argue that a plural and non‐functional approach to literature could offer young people heterogeneous and more creative forms to approach the challenge of gender equality.

A Counterfactual Canon

The article analyzes the relationship between gender and taste at Shakespeare and Company. Using the Shakespeare and Company Project datasets, we discover that the majority of the books in the lending library were by men, and that women were almost twice as likely as men to borrow books by women. We also discover that the female authors with a high ratio of male to female readers are now canonical: Agatha Christie, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore. In contrast, the female authors with the highest ratio of female to male readers are less well-known: Margaret Kennedy, E. M. Delafield, Rebecca West, Elizabeth von Arnim. These final two discoveries are surprising: they suggest that the reading practices of men determined the canon of female authors, and that the reading practices of women might reveal a counterfactual canon of modernism. We consider how this counterfactual canon of female authors might influence future work in literary history.

Still Resisting after All These Years

ABSTRACT The impact of Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader on the development of feminist literary criticism, particularly of the American literary canon, is well known. The parallels between Fetterley's late 1970s call for women to become resistant readers and the work of literary historians invested in the actual reading practices of women reading women's writing (in novels of the early American period) are at the heart of this personal reflection.

“Holding the Dream”: Women’s Favorite Reading Matter in a Portuguese Prison

The reading practices of women, mediated by a prison library in Portugal, constituted an interesting case study. In Santa Cruz do Bispo prison, female prisoners were increasingly aged and excluded from social groups, less literate, and educated. Many were first-time library users and some were beginning readers. This research aimed to understand their reading practices and preferences, their self-assigned meanings, and the roles of reading in prison. Having become aware that industrial literature romance novels were the most requested items, a critical comparative analysis of the three most requested titles was contrasted with readers’ favorite passages to foster a deeper understanding of their preferences and sustain an integrated analysis. Furthermore, a consensualized definition of a “good read” is presented. The results from ethnography and interviews to readers and staff are analyzed taking into account class, gender, ethnicity, age, occupation, and education of the detainees. Conclusions address the fact that although the prison’s educational service and imprisonment conditions propitiated an increase in reading generally, the library was oriented by educational targets and irresponsive to certain demands expressed by readers. Secondly, women readers were using the available top-selling romance novels to sustain their introspective and prospective work, while reckoning with their past and planning for their future. In addition to this reflexive stance, escapist entertainment and knowledge building were important reading purposes.

Identification, Affect, and Escape: Theorizing Popular Romance Reading

Drawing from interviews and book discussions with eleven women who read popular romance fiction, in this article I examine the affective, embodied, and identificatory reading practices that constitute women's engagements with romance novels. I argue that while these women's reading practices do not resemble what typically are called critical reading practices, they nevertheless produce critical knowledges and should be examined as an alternative framework for approaching texts.

Leitura e escrita femininas no século XIX

Esta pesquisa analisa as práticas de leitura e escrita realizadas por mulheres na primeira metade do século XIX. Trata-se de um período em que o domínio das habilidades de leitura e escrita no Brasil era restrito a uma pequena parcela da população, existindo poucos indícios dessas práticas relacionadas ao universo feminino. Foram analisados periódicos em circulação no período, entre eles O Mentor das Brasileiras (São João del-Rei/MG, 1829-1832), em que estão presentes textos de autoria feminina e referências às práticas de leitura de mulheres.

The Literary Culture of Workers, Women and Peasants in Novels by André Léo

The reading practices of women, workers and peasants became the focus of intense debates among educators, political thinkers and religious groups in France during the second half of the nineteenth century. Since reading was seen as both beneficial and dangerous, they encouraged reading among all sectors of the population, while at the same time attempting to regulate which books should be available to more vulnerable readers. As reading became more prevalent and controversial in France, literary representations of reading also multiplied in the socially conscious fiction of authors like Andre Leo, a novelist and journalist best known as one of the petroleuses during the 1871 Paris Commune. (1) Andre Leo's novels Un Marriage scandaleux (1862) and Les Drames du cerveau (1882) provide excellent illustrations of the dichotomy between good reading and bad reading, between reading practices that enlighten and those that destroy. In this article I will analyze the literary practices depicted in these two novels, noting in particular the difference in the representation of reading in the two books. The earlier novel reflects the author's idealism and political optimism in the decade before the Commune when she was active in the feminist and socialist movements, while the later one, published twenty years later, is much more negative, reflecting her disillusionment with the lack of socialist and feminist activism and progressive change in the new French Republic. Literacy rates rose dramatically in France during the nineteenth century. According to James Allen, in 1801 only 50% of men and 28% of women were active readers, while in 1901 those figures had risen to 96% for men and 94% for women (Allen: Table A-7). Because of this phenomenal increase in literacy, the reading habits of women, workers and peasants came to be considered as a social problem from the Catholic right to the anticlerical left. Everyone was concerned with what and how these emerging literate classes were reading. Lacking the proper educational background, intellectual rigor and economic resources, workers and peasants were said to read indiscriminately. Without guidance and resources, they would certainly read the wrong books--political propaganda for example, or popular fiction--rather than useful books and seventeenth-century classics. One important development that affected reading practices in the nineteenth century was the invention of the mass press. By the final decades of the century, the numerous inexpensive daily newspapers with widespread readership of la petite presse were blamed for wreaking havoc among workers with their palpitating faits divers and serialized novels. Reading was equally dangerous, perhaps even more so, for women. Not only did it take them away from their domestic duties, but it also troubled their weak, impressionable minds. Since women purportedly lacked a strong, male constitution, the intellectual strain of reading could cause them to be afflicted with all sorts of physical and psychological ailments. Popular novels, though less of an intellectual challenge, presented a different sort of danger. Women--it was said--identified more with the characters, which caused them to develop unrealistic or immoral fantasies. Reading novels led to rampant bovarysme, a tendency toward escapist day-dreaming in which women imagine themselves as the heroine of a romance, refusing to acknowledge reality. Worse still, as in Madame Bovary, reading romantic fiction stimulated erotic desires and passions in women. In her study of the representation of reading in nineteenth-century novels, Carla Peterson points out that in the novel, reading could cause gender trouble for both men and women: while female reader-protagonists became more independent, assertive and sexually knowledgeable, their male counterparts took on more feminine characteristics such as passivity and emotional sensitivity. Peterson notes a major difference in the relationship between reader-protagonists in French and English novels. …

Reading and Writing inSociable Letters; Or, How Margaret Cavendish Read Her Plutarch

AbstractMargaret Cavendish's Sociable Letters (1664), a fictionalized collection of private letters, makes reading and writing its subject in the broadest possible sense. Individual letters in the collection frequently offer commentary on books and describe the reading practices of women and men. This essay argues that Sociable Letters can be read as a case study of the conditions of women's reading practices. In Sociable Letters Cavendish demonstrates both an awareness of gendered models of reading and a strategic reclamation of the desiring female reader. Epistolarity becomes a means for some women to negotiate identities as reading subjects. More broadly, this essay suggests that Sociable Letters can contribute to a more inclusive history of early modern reading, which has often been defined in terms of a normative male reader. Cavendish's extended commentary on Plutarch's Lives offers a skeptical critique of humanist models of reading. In her responses to Plutarch's Cato and Pericles, Cavendish descri...

The garden of delights: reform and renaissance for women in the twelfth century

In The Garden of Delights, Fiona J. Griffiths offers the first major study of the Hortus deliciarum, a magnificently illuminated manuscript of theology, biblical history, and canon law written both by and explicitly for women at the end of the twelfth century. In so doing she provides a brilliantly persuasive new reading of female monastic culture. Through careful analysis of the contents, structure, and organization of the Hortus, Griffiths argues for women's profound engagement with the spiritual and intellectual vitality of the period on a level previously thought unimaginable, overturning the assumption that women were largely excluded from the renaissance and reform of this period. As a work of scholarship that drew from a wide range of sources, both monastic and scholastic, the Hortus provides a witness to the richness of women's reading practices within the cloister, demonstrating that it was possible, even late into the twelfth century, for communities of religious women to pursue an educational program that rivaled that available to men. At the same time, the manuscript's reformist agenda reveals how women engaged the pressing spiritual questions of the day, even going so far as to criticize priests and other churchmen who fell short of their reformist ideals. Through her wide-ranging examination of the texts and images of the Hortus, their sources, composition, and function, Griffiths offers an integrated understanding of the whole manuscript, one which highlights women's Latin learning and orthodox spirituality. The Garden of Delights contributes to some of the most urgent questions concerning medieval religious women, the interplay of gender, spirituality, and intellectual engagement, to discussions concerning women scribes and writers, women readers, female authorship and authority, and the visual culture of female communities. It will be of interest to art historians, scholars of women's and gender studies, historians of medieval religion, education, and theology, and literary scholars studying questions of female authorship and models of women's reading.

Women's Reading Practices in Seventeenth-Century England: Margaret Fell's "Women's Speaking Justified"

In Women’s Speaking Justified (1666) and other pamphlets, Margaret Fell quotes the King James Version of the Bible, but inaccurately. The mistakes are variants resulting from oral transmission: Fell has memorized much of the Bible. This discovery reinforces the views that speech, manuscript, and print were complementary rather than opposing modes in early modern England and that Quaker culture was dependent on memorizing. Fell’s quotations also show that she read comparatively, correcting the KJV against other translations, and that she seems to have memorized by topics rather than verse by verse. Fell’s reading practice thus demonstrates that humanist reading methods migrated from men with education in multiple languages to women with vernacular education but multiple translations in seventeenth-century England. Moreover, Fell provides a Quaker theory of reading: reading is not transporting outer knowledge to inner storage, but enriching outer translation by inner Word, creating a virtual Bible of the spirit.

Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (review)

Reviewed by: Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England Sally Parkin Snook, Edith , Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England, ( Women and Gender in the Early Modern World), Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005; cloth; pp. viii, 188; 4 b/w illustrations; RRP £45; ISBN 0754652564. Using an unusual introductory technique, the reader is drawn into this work through the analysis of the symbolic information incorporated in the portrait of Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset. The portrait establishes the identity, family heritage, cultural legacy and pursuits, and, most importantly considering the remit of the book, the reading and literary habits of Lady Anne. [End Page 213] Edith Snook has produced a work which studies the representations of reading in the writings produced by women from 1540 to 1640. Each chapter concentrates on a specific literary work, contextualising it within the framework of the gendering of the English Reformation, seventeenth-century works of literacy, Catholic women readers and writers, passion, and the reading and writing of secrets in women's written works. Anne Askew and Katherine Parr represent themselves as pious women whilst exposing the gender operations of religious reform in Reformation England. Dorothy Leigh's work is viewed in relation to the maternal voice and its engagement with religious-political issues from outside the public and political conflict. Elizabeth Grymeston offers a different maternal perspective, the debate from a Catholic point of view. Aemelia Lanyer and Mary Wroth explore reading practices through forms of writing which encouraged various types of social relationships, using religious poetry as their main textual form. Throughout, each printed work is explored as a means of establishing how women represented themselves as readers, how women readers regarded their social status, as well as examining the diversity of women's reading practices. For all these women, reading becomes a technique for authoritative self-invention, enabling them to use the reading material to provide an alternative, almost subliminal, discourse about women's minds. In doing so, their voices and readings move them into spheres from which they are normally excluded: intellectual, political, and literary culture. Documenting women's reading in the Early Modern period shows that the readings were not following social expectations or traditionally accepted readings intended for women. Spanning the subjective private and the public dynamic, the book encompasses the diverse nature of discourses on reading in the Early Modern world. Writing about reading, women engaged in a process of proposing change, situating their subjective experience of reading within the way reading was practised in Early Modern English society. Many of the texts written by women were published by others and underwent several printings as interest in the debates about faith and reading encouraged a wider readership. Works in which women were involved in the publication process represented reading in a more forceful way, attempting to encourage reader sympathy towards women's writing. The authors covered in this book often represent themselves as 'unlearned', a term used to disassociate them from the humanist education which was a male realm but only for those who were expected to participate in public life. Education itself was divided into social hierarchies and women were amongst [End Page 214] those who were partially literate, those who did not read Latin or Greek but read in English. Women, it was anticipated, needed a less perfect education as they were confined to non-public spheres of life. Social and political power required a different form of education. The book provides ample evidence of the contribution women writers made to the history of reading. Their presence shaped ideas, developed practical reading literacy, and enabled them to move into the world outside the household. Women writers of the Early Modern period should not be made invisible by lack of reference to their contribution to the history of reading. Copyright © 2006 the author

The anorexic body: Reading disorders

ABSTRACT This article examines the feminist interpretation of self-starvation or anorexia nervosa as a pathology brought about by women's consumption of media images of thin femininity. The anorexic subject is presented as a synecdoche for the alienated female body in general; female corporeality is damaged by the consumption of phallocentric representations. This negative view of women's uncritical ‘consumption’ of media texts can be connected to nineteenth-century discussions of the causes of hysteria, revealing a similar pathologization of women's reading practices. An alternative framework for conceptualizing eating disorders is outined. First, closer attention to the biomedical identity construct of anorexia nervosa reveals it to be contested by the very subjects it names. Second, a consideration of the continuum between the disordered practices of self-starvation and weight-loss regimens more generally suggests that both are informed by the biomedical discourse of metabolism, as a framework which inscribes the body as a calculable source of energy. The practices of anorexia nervosa are thus situated within a genealogy of weight-loss regimens which in turn produce narratives about the female body.