Woman Citizen's Library, 12 vols.
A Complete Run
Of This 12-Volume Suffragist Periodical
—
With Contributions By Nearly Every Major Suffragist Of The Era
[Periodicals]. The Woman Citizen’s Library. A Systematic Course of Reading in Preparation for the Larger Citizenship. Editor Shailer Mathews, D.D. et al … Twelve Volumes. Fully Illustrated. Chicago: The Civics Society, (1913-1914).
12 vols., 8vos.; frontispieces and photographic illustrations of important suffragists, suffragist events, and political institutions throughout; title pages, and illustration borders, printed in color; previous contemporary owner’s signature in Vol. 1 (“Margaret Cameron Schiff, 1916” – we wonder if she was a relative, however distant, of the famous leftist newspaper publisher Dorothy Schiff); each volume uniformly bound in publisher’s brown cloth, with the title and aggregate subject stamped in white on the spine (i.e., “Political Science”; “Practical Politics”; “The Woman Citizen and the Home”, etc.); occasional shaken, with tender hinges.
First editions; not reprinted. Not a single volume is held by the Library of Congress; nor does its inaugural editor look up in the standard literature (he is identified on title pages as “Dean Divinity School, The University of Chicago; President Western Economic Society”). This is the first complete run we have seen on the market; and anecdotal evidence suggests it is the first full set to have hit the trade in over twenty years, if ever.
A fascinating early feminist hardbound periodical providing, as its subtitle states, “a systematic course of reading in preparation for the larger citizenship.” Its editors’ intent was to prepare women and their supporters for political and other worldly choices once they obtained the right to vote.
The structure each of the first six volumes follows a pattern, including the following elements: a frontispiece representing an American ideal—the Capitol, the House of Representatives, the White House; photographic illustrations throughout providing analogous illustrations nationwide or from around the world; a bibliography of recommended reading for “those who wish to read more extensively;” two to four sections, each encompassing four to six chapters, followed by a set of Questions for Review, and Subjects for Special Study.
The structure of the final six volumes follows much the same pattern, though in the place of sections, chapters, Questions and Subjects, we find discreet articles by notable feminists.
Highlights of each volume follow.
Political Science. (1913) Edited by Jesse Macy. Portraits of series contributors. Series editor’s introduction by Shailer Mathews: “Woman’s Opportunity and the Larger Citizenship” (titled at its head, “What the Woman’s Citizen’s Library Is”); frontispiece of the United States Capitol. The volume is divided into the following four parts: “The Origin of the Modern State,” “Switzerland: A Typical Democracy,” “Origin of English Democracy,” and “Democracy in the New World.”
The partial list of series contributors in the front of the volume, which provides a head shot of each, includes Florence Kelley, Jane Addams, Margaret J. Evans, Mary Grey Peck, Anna E. Blount, Frances A. Kellor, Lucia Ames Mead, Carrie Chapman Catt, Marion Talbot, and others.
According to Mathews’s Introduction, “What The Woman Citizen’s Library Is:”
Epochs begin with the extension of rights. When these rights involve the sacrifice of property or privilege, there result the revolutions with which our history books are filled.
But sometimes, among people of high social morality, these epochs spring from the spirit of democracy rather than the surrender of rights. That is the characteristic of the new age into which we enter, as women are granted larger opportunities in social life. Men begin to share with women privileges which have come down from the ancient days when men were the owners of their families and warriors because they could be citiz
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