Intimate Practices

      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.