As research has shown (Elizabeth Long, 2004; Elizabeth McHenry, 2002; Katherine West Scheil, 2012), late-nineteenth and early-twentieth women’s literary clubs were sites of learning and discussion, which gave American women opportunities to use reading as a way to reflect on their position in society and encouraged them to produce their own written works. However, while literary clubs and their effects on women as readers and writers have received attention of book studies scholars, the Junior League—a philanthropic rather than literary organization founded in 1901 and members of which included such prominent figures as Eleanor Roosevelt and Julia Child—has received little to no attention for the literary output of its national network of members.

Addressing the time period of ca. 1910 to 1940, Ellen Barth’s post-doctoral research project looks to two nationally-distributed publications put out by the Junior League of America—the Junior League Bulletin and, later, the Junior League Magazine—as well as archival documents from American Junior Leagues and its members, in order to understand how Junior League publications encouraged women to take up their pens and build literary identities. Through their plays, anthologies, poetry, and published bibliographies, Junior League women connected and contributed to the national movements of feminism, modernism, and debates around censorship. Research thus considers not only what Junior League women wrote but, additionally, what these texts ‘wrote’ for American society and culture at large.

With a growing interest in the areas of critical and feminist bibliography (Maruca and Ozment, 2023; Ozment, 2020), this work contributes to these areas by recognizing the role of club women as more than resistant readers (Radway 1984) and by drawing attention to the ways women have helped shape American culture through their literary output, in this way building off of the works of Anne Firor Scott (1993) and Kimberly Wilmot Voss (2017), both of whom have argued that more attention must be paid to the role of ‘well-behaved’ women in American history.