Reading to Lead: Periodical Consumption in Progressive Era Florida Women's Clubs

Thanks to the pioneering work of a generation of women’s historians, scholars now know a great deal more about the scope and variety of the women’s organizations that formed in the mid to late 19^th century, particularly in the northeast. While some scholarship exists on women’s clubs in the South, little work exists on the women’s club movement in Florida, or on the reading habits of Florida women. During the early years of the women’s club movement, the National Federation of Women’s Clubs (NFWC) and National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC) routinely published reading recommendations for state and local affiliated clubs. Predictably, perhaps, these lists primarily advised reading the “great works” – books on western literature, history, and cultures. However, Florida women’s clubs often strayed from the reading programs prescribed by the NFWC and NACWC. Instead, Florida women’s clubs often relied for their reading matter on periodicals. An examination of meeting minutes for some of the earliest clubs forming in Florida reveals that club members often gathered the poetry, short fiction, essays, and current events featured in local, regional and national periodical publications when preparing their club papers for discussion or debate. This paper examines the periodical reading habits of several Florida women’s clubs, to argue that while Florida women might have still been living in “frontier” circumstances, they were “pioneering” in their consumption of periodical literature, often deviating from the prescriptive reading practices emanating from their national associations, and from the practices of their more “elite” sister clubs.