Smart Women: Discover America's Historic All-Women Study Clubs | Book on Women's Education & Empowerment | Perfect for History Buffs & Book Clubs
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SKU:89003423
Product Description
Hiding in plain sight throughout America are historic, highly private women’s self-education groups. These clubs are fascinating survivors from an era following the Civil War when women couldn’t apply to most colleges and were told they shouldn’t leave the home. In their earliest days, the study groups also contributed to the welfare of their towns - often by helping to found their town’s first library-and served to get women out of the house and into the world. Today’s all-women study clubs have no civic component but still fashion their meetings as their founding great-grandmothers did, with members taking turns giving original papers. In Smart Women, author Ann Dodds Costello discusses her four-year quest to locate, often visit, and describe today’s 100-year-old, all-women study clubs, all over America, even though they do not publicize and have no central organization or knowledge of each other. Included: an invaluable, first-ever directory of most of the book’s ninety-plus clubs.
Customer Reviews
"Smart Women" tells the remarkable, unknown story of the century-old self-improvement clubs that sprang up around the United States after the Civil War. The amazing thing is that the author, Ann Costello,spent years tracking down an enormous number of these clubs that are still very much in business! They stay under the radar, so little is known about them, but their very existence speaks to the yearning for culture and education that were denied women until recent times. These "civilizers" of a rough and tumble America went on to found the libraries, art museums, orphanages, and symphonies in their cities. Today, they don't do good works as organizations and many of their members are highly educated, professional women. Still, the women continue to faithfully attend for the camaraderie, elegant refreshments, and well-researched papers the members--and the members alone-- present to their peers. Just when you think everything that can have been discovered about America has been discovered, along comes a "Smart Women" to prove you wrong. It's a rewarding work.
