Elizabeth McHenry was almost done with her doctoral studies in English when she first stumbled upon a turn-of-the-century African-American women’s literary society in 1992. An expert in African-American literature, she’d never heard of such a thing, and it challenged her assumptions about her field. African-American writing has always traced its roots through slave narratives and oral traditions instead of through the literary culture of free blacks in the North. “Black literacy has really been understood as black illiteracy,” she says now. How would a reading club fit into this tradition?
McHenry, MA ’92, PhD ’93, decided to investigate. She scoured university archives and followed leads to surviving members of literary societies. Her research forms the basis of a book, Forgotten Readers: African-American Literary Societies, 1830-1940, which she is writing as a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, N.C. McHenry discovered that African-American reading groups -- gaining popularity today, as all reading groups are -- trace back nearly 200 years, though it is difficult to estimate their numbers. In the mid-19th century, members typically read a wide range of fiction and nonfiction, often culled from newspapers like Freedom’s Journal or The Colored American. Later material included 20th-century magazines like Crisis and Opportunity. Some participants shared their own stories, poems and essays.
The tradition began in the early 19th century when free African Americans in Northern cities established mutual aid societies that promoted education and created lending libraries. Like many minority groups, they believed that full participation in American life would come only if they remained committed to self-improvement. As a result, McHenry asserts, literary societies served a political purpose: to help prepare African Americans for civic life and to prove them worthy of the privileges that were denied them.
History didn’t work out exactly as anticipated; it took another century for blacks to win civil rights. But, as McHenry argues, the reading groups had an important though indirect impact.
“It all depends on how you define the political realm,” she points out. “If more African Americans were reading newspapers and becoming more vocal about current events, isn’t that political, too?” The exchange of knowledge is intrinsically beneficial, she observes, and many reading groups had close ties to flourishing cultural movements, like the arts explosion in the 1920s called the Harlem Renaissance.
McHenry was to make another surprising discovery while studying the societies. Another scholar asked if she could help solve a long-standing puzzle: Frederick Douglass had met his future wife, Anna, at her literary society, but it was well known that Anna never learned to read. At the time they met, Frederick was a literate slave, while Anna was an illiterate freewoman who participated in literary societies. McHenry realized that, ironically, there were probably many illiterate members of early literary societies -- and that was why so many meetings began with someone reading aloud. She concluded that the distinctions between literacy and illiteracy weren’t as fixed in the 19th century as they are now, and that many people who would today be considered functionally illiterate still participated fully in the literature and culture of their time.
McHenry’s work provides a historical context for the Go On Girl! Book Club, a well-known society that started as a single group of African-American women in 1991. Now a national organization, it publishes a newsletter, invites visits from African-American authors and provides feedback to publishers on its members’ reading habits.
In the last century, as today, more women than men participated in reading groups. McHenry speculates that African-American women embraced the literary societies because they were doubly excluded -- by race and gender -- from other communities. Reading groups are experiencing a revival among African-American women, she believes, because much about their life experiences remains unvoiced by mainstream American culture.
Victoria Olsen, PhD ’94, is an affiliated scholar at Stanford’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender.
