University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 5-2012 Literacy by subscription: writing instruction in turn-of-the-century American periodicals. Alicia Brazeau University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Recommended Citation Brazeau, Alicia, "Literacy by subscription: writing instruction in turn-of-the-century American periodicals." (2012). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 145. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/145 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. For more information, please contact [email protected]. LITERACY BY SUBSCRIPTION: WRITING INSTRUCTION IN TURN-OF-THE­ CENTURY AMERICAN PERIODICALS By Alicia Brazeau B.A., Grand Valley State University M.A., University of Louisville A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Paltial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky May 2012 LITERACY BY SUBSCRIPTION: WRITING INSTRUCTION IN TURN-OF-THE- CENTURY AMERICAN PERIODICALS By Alicia Brazeau B.A., Grand Valley State University M.A., University of Louisville A Dissertation Approved on April 2, 2012 By the following Dissertation Committee Carol Mattingly, Dissertation Director Bruce Horner Bronwyn T. Williams Susan M. Ryan Marilyn Cooper ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to especially thank Carol Mattingly, the director of this dissertation, for all of the insight, knowledge, and moral support she provided throughout this project; I could not have been written this without her. I would also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, including Bronwyn Williams, Bruce Horner, and Marilyn Cooper, for all their help and responses, and Susan Ryan, for helping to inspire the idea in the first place. III ABSTRACT LITERACY BY SUBSCRIPTION: WRITING INSTRUCTION IN TURN-OF-THE­ CENTURY AMERICAN PERIODICALS Alicia Brazeau April 2, 2012 th th This dissertation examines popular periodicals in the late 19 - and early 20 _ century America as pivotal artifacts in the history of literacy education. It first reviews current histories of literacy, writing instruction, and magazines at the turn of the century, and then concentrates on the formation, circulation, and function of agricultural journals and of two women's periodicals, Harper's Bazar and The Ladies' Home Journal, between 1880 and 1910. In analyzing this collection of periodicals, this dissertation outlines both how magazines provided audiences with explicit instruction in reading and writing practices, and how editors and readers constructed unique, contextually-specific, definitions of advanced literacy. Finally, this dissertation argues that periodicals not only illustrate a collection of literacy practices and pedagogies vital to expanding our understanding of how people have engaged questions of literacy in different historical contexts, but also that popular magazines offered readers identities to assume in their reading and writing experiences. Following the introduction which surveys the scholarship on literacy history and argues for the importance of magazines in this history, the dissertation is divided into four chapters. The first three chapters each examine Harper's Bazar, The Ladies' Home Journal, and the agricultural publications, respectively. Chapters Two and IV Three concentrate on how these two different, but influential, women's magazines deployed two separate conceptions of literacy, with Harper's Bazar framing ideal literacy practices as part of the communal learning present in women's clubs, and with Ladies' Home Journal urging its readers to see themselves as critical buyers and sellers in a literary marketplace. Next, Chapter Four examines how farm magazines articulated an imperative for farmers to contribute to the press in advancing agriculture as a profession and defined good writing as a forum for education. Finally, the conclusion integrates the previous discussions of both the women's and agricultural journals to demonstrate how all of these popular publications articulated literacy identities for their audiences that granted writers authority as mentors in their textual communities and emphasized the value of readers' contributions. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................... ii ABSTRACT ................................................... iii INTRODUCTION: LITERACY BY SUBSCRIPTION .................................. 1 JOINING THE CLUB: CLUB WOMEN, MAGAZINE READERS, AND SCHOLARS ...........27 BUYING AND SELLING LITERACY: THE LADIES HOME JOURNAL . ...................................67 "SPECIAL INVITATION TO WRITE": MAGAZINE READERS AS CONTRIBUTORS ....................... 103 CONCLUSION: IDENTIFYING READERS AND WRITERS .......................... 141 REFERENCES .................................................. 171 CURRICULUM VITAE ........................................... 187 VI CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION LITERACY BY SUBSCRIPTION In 1900,238 thousand persons were enrolled in college courses in the United States. Three years later, in 1903, a single magazine, The Ladies' Home Journal could claim one million subscribers and even more readers. At the dawn of the 20th century, in the midst of a literacy crisis that has received a great deal of attention from literacy scholars such as Graff and Gordon and Gordon, and at the same time that required composition courses were first being incorporated at institutions like Harvard, Yale, and University of Michigan, there is this incontrovertible fact: far, far more persons were reading magazines than were sitting in college composition classrooms. Despite this, however, our histories of literacy and composition in the United States have almost wholly ignored popular periodicals and their place in the literate lives of such a large population. If, as compositionists, we accept that at least one of our fundamental disciplinary goals is to understand and historicize the ways that people have learned to write and enter into a community of readers, then we must also critically consider the limits we have placed on historical study and the populations we have documented. The vast majority of the histories of composition and rhetorical studies have focused quite exclusively on academic institutions and English and Composition Departments in particular, despite repeated arguments suggesting the value of widening our historical purview (Gere, Miller, Gold). Such a sustained focus on upper-level institutional education has meant that histories of composition, especially those covering the first part of the 20th century, have limited themselves to an incredibly small and homogenous percentage of the U.S. population. Likewise, more general histories of literacy, while considering larger populations as well as education at the primary and secondary level, have tended to restrict their studies to census reports, schools, and tax and employment documents. In The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City, Harvey Graff stresses that his numerical approach allows him to provide the necessary empirical basis to properly understand qualitative discussions of literacy history. In Literacy in America: Historic Journey and Contemporary Solutions, Edward E. Gordon and Elaine H. Gordon likewise draw from a wide range of materials, linking numerical data with autobiographical materials to consider the place of reading in the lives of individuals. In this way, both Graff and Gordon and Gordon use their histories to move beyond institutional ideologies, common myths about literacy, and strictly numerical records to gain a better understanding of what actual 19th -century persons were doing with literate skills, or the lack of them. Although many newspapers and periodicals at this time certainly continued to propagate what Graff has called the "literacy myth," they represent a complex site of study in that they offered multiple perspectives on literacy and, more importantly, articulate their own definitions of literacy for their readers. Regardless of the kinds of books they frequently attempted to convince readers they ought to be reading, the popularity of the magazines themselves is evidence of what 19th -century 2 Americans truly were reading, and as such they remain important artifacts of the literate lives of a wide population. While valuable, histories concentrating on university texts and pedagogies, and other institutional academic sites, need to be joined by complementary and contradictory histories of other sites of literacy learning - sites that tell the story of readers and writers not included in the college classroom. This is not to suggest that scholars have wholly ignored the history of literacy and rhetorical learning in non-academic settings; to the contrary, in "Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The Extracurriculum of Composition," Anne Ruggles Gere argues that composition historians should extend beyond the academy and professional settings to incorporate the diverse contexts where