The Hidden History of Book Clubs

What if the book club wasn't just a cozy tradition, but one of the most powerful tools for change in women's history? In this episode of the Brit Lit Book Club, we trace the story of women's reading communities from the salons of ancient Greece and 18th-century France all the way to Oprah's Book Club and BookTok, and uncover just how much of the world women built from a circle of chairs and a shared book.

We explore the founding of Sorosis in 1868, born from a woman being turned away from a Charles Dickens dinner. We dive into the Black women's literary clubs of the 19th century, including the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs and their unforgettable motto, Lifting As We Climb. 

We look at how suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton called the women's club "the school of politics for women." And we spend time in our beloved Britain — with the Brontës on the Yorkshire moors, Jane Austen in Bath, and Agatha Christie in Devon, tracing the radical literary tradition that runs through the very landscapes we explore on the Book Club Tour.

This is the first episode in our Women's History Month series. More episodes coming all month long.

In This Episode:

• The ancient roots of communal reading — from Greek symposiums to Roman litterati
• The women who ran the literary salons of 17th and 18th century France
• How working-class reading societies in Britain crowdfunded libraries before crowdfunding existed
• The founding of Sorosis (1868) and the General Federation of Women's Clubs — over a million members strong
• The Black women's literary clubs that fought lynching, built schools, and changed America
• How the suffrage movement grew directly from the women's club movement
• The Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, and Agatha Christie as literary revolutionaries
• Oprah's Book Club, Goodreads, and BookTok — the tradition continues
• How the Book Club Tour carries this tradition forward today

Mentioned in This Episode:

• Sorosis — founded by Jane Cunningham Croly, 1868
• The General Federation of Women's Clubs
• The National Association of Colored Women's Clubs — founded 1896, Mary Church Terrell
• Ida B. Wells & Anna Julia Cooper
• Benjamin Franklin's Junto (1727)
• Pandita Ramabai
• The Brontë sisters — Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
• Jane Austen — Persuasion, the Pump Room in Bath
• Agatha Christie — Devon & the Jane Austen & Agatha Christie Tour
• Oprah's Book Club — Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon
• Reese Witherspoon's Book Club
• BookTok

Upcoming Book Club Tours:

• 🇬🇧 British Book Club Tour — July 2026 & June 2027
• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scottish Book Club Tour — June 2027
• 🇫🇷 French Book Club Tour — July 2027

Visit thebookclubtour.com to learn more or book your spot. Custom trips for your own book club are also available!

Connect With Us:

• Instagram: @thebookclubtour
• Website: thebookclubtour.com

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Love this podcast? Imagine walking the Yorkshire moors where the Brontës found inspiration, visiting Jane Austen's writing desk at Chawton, and exploring Shakespeare's birthplace with fellow book lovers. We do all this and more on The Book Club Tour!

Follow along with our adventures, or join us! 

🌐 Explore our tours: thebookclubtour.com
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👥 Facebook: @thebookclubtour

Transcript

0:03

Hello, and welcome back to the Brit Lit Book Club. Glad you're here. Pour yourself something warm. I've got Earl Gray today, which feels exactly right for this episode because we are talking about something that is on the surface, wonderfully ordinary women sitting together, drinking tea, talking about books, and then just beneath the surface revolution. March is Women's History Month. And for me, there was no better time to dig into the history of book clubs, a tradition that has been shaped, sustained, and championed largely by women for centuries. From the literary salons of the 18th century Britain to the community reading circles of the Victorian era, women have always been at the heart of how we gather around books. This episode is the first in a series I'll be releasing throughout March, exploring the intersection of women's history and British literature. So stay tuned. There's a lot more to come. Last week on my Instagram, the book Club tour, I made a post for International Women's Day about the history of book clubs. It was fascinating to do the research for that. And today I wanna take you through the history of book clubs, and specifically, I want to shine a light on what women did with them because the story of Women's Book Club is not a footnote in history. It is in so many ways the story of how women built civic life in America and around the world with almost no institutional support. With their own hands in their own living rooms. I've been sitting with this material for a few weeks, and I'll be honest with you, I kept getting a little emotional researching it because the more I read, the more I saw something that felt very close to home. Women gathering around books, building friendships, and doing something meaningful together in the world. Sound familiar? That's exactly what we do at the Brit Lit Book Club and the book Club tour. And today I want to show you just how old and how powerful that tradition really is. It goes all the way back to ancient Greece and it runs right through the mos of Yorkshire and the drawing rooms of bath and the cobbled closes of Edinburgh. So settle in. This one earns every stop along the way. Let's talk about where it all began, the ancient roots and reading as a communal act. Here's something we're sitting with for most of human history, reading was not a solitary act. It was a shared one. In ancient Greece, the symposium, literally meaning drinking together, was a gathering where citizens would share wine, and more importantly, ideas. They debated philosophy, poetry, ethics, and the nature of a good life. Plato's Dialogues, the very texts we still read in universities today were written in that conversational format because that is how knowledge actually lived in the back and forth, and the question and the challenge and the moment where someone says something that reframes everything you thought you knew. In ancient Rome wealthy citizens called the literati would gather in grand villas to hear literature read aloud, poetry histories, philosophy. Books were not objects most people owned. They were experiences you went somewhere to have together, and I find that so beautiful and so human. We have always wanted to read in community long before book club was a phrase anyone used. Let's talk about the salons and the women who ran them. Fast forward to the Renaissance in Europe, and particularly the 17th and 18th century France, and you get to the salon. These were private, intellectual gatherings usually held in the home of wealthy or educated women where writers, philosophers, scientists, and artists would come to talk. And I want to be very clear about this. These weren't gatherings that women attended, women ran them. Women like Madame de Rambouillet opened their homes as the intellectual centers of their age. They curated the guest list, they set the topics, they led the conversation. In a world where women had virtually no access to universities, no seats in Parliament, no public voice, the salon was the only institution they controlled, and they used it brilliantly. That tradition set the stage for something that would explode magnificently in the 19th century. And I'll say it now and set the stage for everything we do at the Book Club Tour. The birth of the modern book club, reading societies in the 18th century. By the late 17 hundreds, literacy was growing. The printing press had been changing the world for three centuries, and something new emerged. The reading Society. Groups of people who would pool their money to purchase books, circulate them among members, and then meet to discuss what they'd read. Crowdfunding a library before crowdfunding existed, and it was happening across Britain and America, not just among the wealthy. Working class, reading societies formed in England tied to labor movements and non-conformist churches. The message was radical. In its simplicity, we will educate ourselves on our own terms. Benjamin Franklin gave us one of the earliest American examples. His Junto founded in Philadelphia, 1727. 12 working men meeting every Friday to discuss philosophy, science, and politics. Franklin called it one of the most useful things he ever did, and the Junto eventually evolved into the American Philosophical Society, one of America's great intellectual institutions, a book club that built an institution. Hold onto that thought. We'll come back to it. Now this is where I really want to slow down because this is part of the story that I think most people simply do not know, and it is the heart of this episode. After the Civil War and the 1860s, seventies and eighties, American women began forming literary clubs in extraordinary numbers, and these clubs were about so much more than books. Think about the world these women were living in. They could not vote in many states. They could not own property. They had almost no access to higher education. The professions were almost entirely closed to them. They had no seats and any legislature, no voice, and almost any public institution. But they could gather, they could read and they could organize. The book club became the first civic space that women could claim entirely as their own, and what they built inside that space was extraordinary. They raised money for public libraries because public libraries barely existed. They established schools, they lobbied for kindergartens, which were a radical new concept. The campaigned for sanitation reform, for public parks, for child labor laws, all of it out of a book club. One of the first and most important of these clubs was Sorosis, founded in New York City in 1868. Here's how it started. Journalists, Jane Cunningham Crowly, who wrote under the pen name, Jenny June was refused admission to a press dinner honoring Charles Dickens. She was a working journalist. She had earned her seat at the table and she was turned away because she was a woman. Now, she could have simply been angry and she was, but what she did without anger is the interesting part. She founded a club. A club for professional women writers, artists, educators to meet, discuss, and support one another's work. Sorosis became one of the most influential women's clubs in American history. And it inspired hundreds of similar clubs across the country. By 1890, Crowly helped found the General Federation of Women's Clubs, an umbrella organization that eventually had over a million members. A million women, organized, educated, ready to act. And it all started because a woman was told she didn't belong at a dinner table. Let's talk about black women's literary clubs. I have to spend real time here because this chapter of the story deserves to be told. Fully. Black women in the 19th and early 20th centuries faced a double exclusion. They were shut out of public life because of their gender and were shut out of white women's clubs because of their race. So black women built their own. The National Association of Colored Women's Clubs was founded in 1896. Led by women including Mary Church Terrell. Their motto was four words that I find among the most beautiful in American civic history, "lifting as we climb." Meaning as we rise, we bring our communities with us. These clubs fought anti-lynching campaigns. They built orphanages and homes for the elderly. They funded schools and scholarships. They organized voter registration. Figures who were embedded in this literary tradition include Ida B. Wells, the fearless investigative journalist who documented lynching and refused to be silence. And Anna, Julia Cooper, who wrote one of the great works of early feminist philosophy in 1892. They were readers, they were discussers, they were builders, and they changed the country in ways we are still living with today. Let's talk about suffrage and the book club as a school for democracy. You cannot tell the story of women's suffrage movement without telling the story of the Women's Club movement. They're inseparable. The women who fought for the vote, many of them first found their political voice in a literary club. This is where they learned to speak in public. That is where they practiced making arguments, building consensus, running a meeting. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, famously called the Women's Club, the School of Politics for Women. The 19th Amendment, passed in 1920, after more than 70 years of organized struggle did not emerge from nothing. It emerged from decades of women gathering, reading, talking, and building the courage to demand what was rightfully theirs. The book club was part of that infrastructure, a small, quiet, essential part. Okay. Let's talk about Britain and the Book Club. I am the Brit Lit Book Club, so I cannot tell this story without spending some time in the country that is closest to my heart. Britain has one of the richest traditions of women's literary culture in the world, and it runs right through the places that we visit on the Book Club Tour. Think about the Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne writing in the parsonage at Howeth. Up in the Yorkshire moors, they published their male pen names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell because they knew their work would be dismissed if readers knew women had written it. And yet the books they produced changed the English language. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, the Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Books about women's inner lives that had never been written that way before. When we walk those moors on the book club tour, when you stand in that wind and look out over the landscape that Emily Bronte saw every day of her short life, you are standing in the landscape that produced one of the most radical acts of women's literary expression in history. And that is not nothing. Think about Jane Austen writing at a little round table at Chawton, hiding her manuscript under a blotter whenever anyone walked in. Published, anonymously, observed, described, and quietly dismantled the social structures of her era. All from a cottage in Hampshire and the drawing rooms and pump rooms of Bath. When we take tea at the pump room and Bath on our tour, I think about her. I think about how she sat in those rooms, very likely that very one, watching, listening, turning the absurdity of her world into art that 400 years of readers have never put down. And Agatha Christie, who outsold everyone who invented the rules of the genre. Who is still the bestselling fiction writer in history After Shakespeare. These women were not just writing books, they were in their own way doing exactly what the women's clubs were doing in America. At the same time, they were claiming space. They were saying our stories matter. Our observations of the world matter, our voices matter, and they were right. The's talk about book clubs around the world. The book club as a force for women's empowerment was not only a British or American story, in India, Pandita Ramabai organized communities of women around literacy and education in the 19th century fighting for the rights of widows and arguing that women's access to knowledge was inseparable from their liberation. In Latin America, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, women's literary societies in the late 18 hundreds and early 19 hundreds were tied directly to feminist and independence movements. There is almost no liberation movement in modern history that doesn't have a book club somewhere in its roots. Because what Book Clubs create is a community of people who have thought carefully about the world, who can name what is wrong, and imagine something better. Okay, let's talk about modern book clubs. Fast forward through the 20th Century book clubs never disappeared, but they shifted. The Book of the Month Club launched in 1926, brought curated reading to millions of homes by mail. Mid-Century neighborhood book clubs and church reading groups sustained almost entirely by women, keep the tradition alive through decades when the cultural message was women belong at home and women were saying quietly, yes, and look what we are building here. And then 1996 arrives and Oprah Winfrey. Oprah launched her book club on her television show, and it is genuinely impossible to overstate what happened next. Her very first pick was Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Within weeks of an Oprah endorsement, a book would sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Morrison later said that Oprah gave her books a second life. But what I find most remarkable about Oprah's Book Club is what she said implicitly to her audience of mostly women watching afternoon television. You are an intellectual. You can read this serious, challenging, beautiful book, and it will change you. She didn't dumb it down. She trusted her audience completely because she knew what Women's Book Clubs had always known. The Hunger was there, that it had always been there. Today. Good Reads has hundreds of millions of members book talk. The community on TikTok has become one of the most powerful forces in publishing with young women at its center. Virtual book clubs accelerated enormously during the pandemic, meaning a woman in Tennessee can now be in a book club with someone in Edinburgh and someone in Lagos all reading the same book. Modern equivalents of Oprah's Book Club include Reese Witherspoon's book club with its focus on books by and about women. The tools have changed. The impulse hasn't moved an inch.. I wanna stop here and say something directly. Everything I told you today about women gathering around books and building something bigger than themselves about friendship forged through shared reading about the way a group of women with a passion for literature can change each other's lives. That is The Book Club Tour. Tamara and I started this because we believe with our whole hearts that the book is not just something you read. It's a door. It's a way into a place, a time, a life that isn't yours, and a way into a geniune friendship with the women reading it alongside you. When our guests walk the moors at Haworth and talk about Wuthering Heights, they are doing what women have done for centuries: using literature as a lens for understanding the world and each other. When they take tea at the pump room in Bath and talk about Anne Elliot's choices and persuasion, they're participating in a conversation that Jane Austen herself started more than 200 years ago. When they punt down the river, Cherwell in Oxford and laugh in the rain, they are making the kind of memory that only happens when you travel with people who love the same things you do. I hear it from our guests over and over. I came for the books and the history. I stayed for the Friends. That is a women's book club tradition in its purest form. It has always been about more than the books. We have several upcoming tours that I would love for you to consider. Our British Book Club tour is coming in July 2026 and 2027. We travel through the homes of Shakespeare Beatrix Potter, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austin, Dickens, and more. Our Scottish Book Club tour in June, 2027 takes you through Edinburgh, a UNESCO City of Literature, and into the Highlands that inspired Robert Burns, sir Walter Scott and Diana Galden's Outlander. And we have a brand new French Book Club tour launching in July, 2027. You can see all of our tours and get more information at thebookclubtour.com. And if you have a book club of your own. We also do custom trips designed around your group and your reading list, because that, if anything, is the most direct line back to Sorosis and the General Federation and every woman who ever pulled chairs into a circle and said, let's read something and talk about it. Here is what I keep coming back to as I close this episode. When we look at the history through the lens of the book club, specifically through the lens of the Women's Book Club, we see something that is often invisible in the official record. We see the intellectual and civic labor of women, the hours and hours of reading, discussing, organizing and advocating that happened in living rooms and church halls and community centers. Work that didn't make the front page because it wasn't supposed to matter. But that quietly stubbornly built the world We live in: public libraries, women's suffrage, civil rights advocacy, child welfare laws, anti-lynching campaigns, university access, kindergartens, all of it, in some thread, leads back to women sitting together with a book and here is the most beautiful thing: the book club is, at its core, an act of hope. It says, I believe that understanding more about the world will make me a better, more effective, and more compassionate human being. And I believe that doing this with other people will make all of us better together. That is not a small idea, In a world that often feels overwhelming and divided, sitting down with a book and another human being and committing to understand something that is radical. It has always been radical and it has always worked. If you are in a book club, whether it's 10 people or two people, whether you meet in a living room or over zoom, you are part of a tradition that is centuries old. The women who built this tradition did extraordinary things with it. I think we owe it to them to do something extraordinary too. Go read something wonderful and talk to someone about it.