Reading Women

Before the women’s rights movement in the mid-19th century, an observer of an American woman reading a book might have speculated that it was a sentimental story or a housekeeping manual.

Men reading suggested serious literature or business affairs. This was the legacy of two millennia of Western European patriarchal culture, during which male thinkers judged women incapable of higher reasoning and subject only to emotion. Since nature destined them only to marry, have children, oversee the home, and obey their husbands, their education was unnecessary and even threatening. A few male dissenters and rare women defended women’s right to education and self-determination.

Martin Luther’s 16th century call for universal literacy for Bible reading helped introduce state-operated schools for boys, but girls had to wait another 200 years, and then their lessons often centered on domestic affairs. Their leisure reading, enjoyed by the emerging middle-class, often favored “women’s fiction,” novels (many by women) that highlighted female characters’ feelings.

Like its European model, the United States restricted female public education until the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention demanded the “right to a thorough education.” In 1852, Massachusetts became the first state to mandate minimal primary school for all children. Still, the curriculum was often divided between girls’ home-based skills and boys’ general knowledge. Slavery, anti-literacy laws, and segregation prohibited or frustrated the education of Black children, who often relied on underground schooling.

By 1900, with progress in women’s education, nearly 20% of college graduates were women. About an equal percentage made up the American work force. The women’s rights movement, especially for the vote, was well underway.

But conventional attitudes persisted. In 1905, Elizabeth Shippen Green accepted a commission for the visual essay “The Mistress of the House” in Harper’s Monthly Magazine. The eight paintings exemplify what historian Barbara Welter called the Cult of True Womanhood, in which the ideal woman demonstrated “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.”

The True Woman was a contrast to the feminist New Woman, a suffragist who embraced women’s right to full engagement with the world. Shippen Green depicts the Mistress at various homemaking and childcare tasks. In The Library, she holds what appears to be an illustrated poetry volume and a loose print. Pottery, works of art, and decorative curtains form the backdrop. She is free to explore literature and art for her own pleasure and as a model for her children.

Like many professional women, Shippen Green defied the True and New stereotypes in her own life. An artist’s daughter, she attended art schools, worked as an illustrator from her student days, and married architect and professor Huger Elliott.

Gertrude Alice Kay also followed an independent path. After her parents encouraged her art studies, she became a prolific illustrator and author of children’s books.

She remained single and traveled internationally. For Helen Christine Bennett’s humorous 1914 short story “In the Footsteps of the Great” in Pictorial Review, Kay drew a woman whose wide reading inspires her to nag her indulgent husband with constant suggestions for self-improvement based on “great” historical figures. The story and illustration satirize the old idea that reading is a dangerous occupation for women and causes trouble for men.

Bennett also wrote American Women in Civic Work Life, an early 20th-century series of biographies of women’s rights activists. Accomplished illustrators like Shippen Green and Kay and writers like Bennett created idealized or self-mocking images of women to accommodate magazine publishing tastes.

Lucius Hitchcock’s illustration and cover for H. G. Wells’ 1916 novel Mr. Britling Sees It Through (serialized in Collier’s Monthly before its publication as a book) offers another view of the woman reader. The book is set during World War I in an English country manor. American visitor Mr. Direck asks Cecily if she’s reading “the last new novel.” She names instead a work by an Italian philosopher. He flippantly calls it “stiff reading (and) a dry, old book.”

Unfazed, she walks away and leaves him with the gray-haired Mrs. Britling, who expresses skepticism about girls who read too much. Clearly, Cecily faces female disapproval from the older generation as well as young male condescension. Direck falls in love with Cecily, and she gradually warms to him but the war leaves their relationship unresolved. That the publisher chose this illustration for the book’s cover amplifies the importance to the plot of a young woman confident in her right to read without interference.

In 2025, close to 10 million American women are enrolled in college. Many of them experienced the joy of books early in their lives, and as young Francie Nolan discovered in Betty Smith’s 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, “From that time on, the world was hers for the reading.” G&S

Delaware Art Museum
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