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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Gregory, Patricia L. "Women's Experience of Reading in St. Louis Book Clubs," American Studies, Saint Louis University, December 2000.
This study traces the development of St. Louis women’s literary groups in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and compares them to present-day book clubs. Archival sources are used to examine thirteen St. Louis women’s literary groups organized between 1874 and 1920. It also includes observations of eleven St. Louis book clubs and interviews with twenty-five participants to examine the current book club scene. The evidence shows that book clubs have changed in their group structure, methods of accumulating cultural capital and arbitration of taste, and in women’s use of the clubs for affiliation, accommodation and resistance. This study confirms sociologist Elizabeth Long’s findings that reading is much more than a solitary, individual activity. Book club members use their participation to build up social capital and cultural capital, as described by Robert Putnam and Pierre Bourdieu. Today’s working women may not be as rooted in their communities as nineteenth-century women, but they continue to use book clubs to attain social, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual growth.
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