“What a Blessing it is to be Fond of Reading Good Books”: Reading Circles and Catholic Women in Turn-of-the-Century America

By the 1890s, “Catholic Reading Circles”—linked by a national journal, the Catholic Reading Circle Review (1891-1898)—encouraged adult Catholics to embrace reading for pleasure and edification, an extension of the American Church’s educational mission.  Actively promoting Catholic literacy and, in particular, women’s work to foster it, the Reading Circle movement embraced secular literature as well as religious texts.  “What a blessing it is to be fond of reading good books,” argued one contributor to an 1896 issue of the Review, noting that “probably the greatest share of blessing imparted by the Reading Circle has come to women.”           

This paper argues that the short-lived Catholic Reading Circle movement serves as an important entry point for recovering the rich history of American Catholic women’s relationship to the written word.  Indeed, publisher’s trade lists and bibliographies point to a dynamic Catholic print culture both at home and abroad, yet the notion of what one 1897 Catholic University book reviewers termed a “Catholic reading public”—a public that most certainly included American Catholic women—is one that has been largely ignored by historians of religion.  How did sites of Catholic readership—such as home, school, and parish groups—foster an American Catholic intellectual life in which laywomen were encouraged to participate?  Reading Circles, which historians of American Catholicism have documented as a short-lived bridge to more extensive ventures into women’s higher education, are in this paper considered as a model of religious communities drawing on “the word” to reach and shape their female members.   Finally, this paper also imagines new ways of studying the vast output of Catholic publishing in the era of the “Americanist Controversy” order to suggest to scholars that print culture can serve as a potentially fruitful and underrated source base for the study of American Catholics and Catholic women in particular.