Intimate Practices

Résumé du livre

Winner of the 1995 University of Illinois Press-National Women's Studies

Association manuscript prize

Women's clubs at the turn of the century were numerous, dedicated to

a number of issues, and crossed class, religious, and racial lines. Emphasizing

the intimacy engendered by shared reading and writing in these groups,

Anne Ruggles Gere contends that these literacy practices meant that club

members took an active part in reinventing the nation during a period

of major change. Gere uses archival material that documents club members'

perspectives and activities around such issues as Americanization, womanhood,

peace, consumerism, benevolence, taste, and literature--and offers a rare

depth of insight into the interests and lives of American women from the

fin de siècle through the beginning of the roaring twenties.

Intimate Practices is unique in its exploration of a range of

women's clubs--Mormon, Jewish, white middle-class, African American, and

working class--and paints a vast and colorful multicultural, multifaceted

canvas of these widely-divergent women's groups.