Dear Workshop,
On Thursday, January 26, Monica L. Mercado, PhD Candidate in the Department of History will present:
“ ‘What a Blessing it is to be Fond of Reading Good Books’: Catholic Women and the Reading Circle Movement in Turn of the Century America”
Time: 12:00, Thursday, January 26, 2011
Place: Swift Hall, Room 406
Food: Snacks provided, feel free to bring your lunch!
Paper: Copies of the essay are available by emailing changp@uchicago.edu.
Monica writes:
By the 1890s, Catholic reading circles—linked by a national journal and an active Catholic summer school program, modeled on Chautauquas—encouraged adult Catholics to embrace reading for pleasure and edification, as an extension of the American Church’s educational mission. Actively promoting Catholic literacy and, often, women’s work to foster it, the Reading Circle movement embraced a wide range of texts and concerns. “What a blessing it is to be fond of reading good books,” one 1896 article in the Catholic Reading Circle Review concluded, noting that “probably the greatest share of blessing imparted by the Reading Circle has come to women.”
This chapter is the fourth of five planned for my dissertation, “Women and the Word: Gender, Print, and Catholic Identity in Nineteenth-Century America.” Using the reading circles’ reports and syllabi, I explore one way that American Catholics at the turn of the century—lay women, but also many men—were encouraged to inhabit a world of ideas outside the boundaries of their local church or parish: through the printed word, with discussion in a lay-lead environment. Furthermore, as middle and upper-middle class Catholic lay women approached the first years of the twentieth century, they often did so with a thirst for knowledge that had institutional supports unprecedented outside of the convent school. Focusing on Catholic reading circles from the late 1880s through the first decade of the twentieth century, then, I ask how exploring the act of reading “good books” might be one avenue for conceptualizing Catholic laywomen’s attempts to live their faith in the context of the hierarchical church and the larger world of late 19th– and early 20th– century America—especially in light of the fact that most studies of laywomen focus on devotional practice or personal faith. And in the process of reading, I argue, American Catholics began to declare that “culture” and “Catholic” could be synonymous.
Best wishes and stay warm,
– Paul Chang
Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Paul Chang in advance at changp@uchicago.edu.