Clubwomen and Time: An Examination of Temporality in American and British Women’s Literary Clubs

Abstract

This thesis connects women’s literary clubs in America and Britain from 1850 to 1900. It specifically looks at Shakespeare Clubs and Robert Browning Clubs in America, and The Pioneer Club, named for Walt Whitman’s poem, in Britain. The thesis looks at articles, club documents and journal reports printed by and about the clubs, to demonstrate a common theme between them. It further examines original writing left behind by the Shakespeare Clubs as examples of fanfiction. The thesis posits that these clubs represent a separate sphere of women’s time, forming spaces of temporal reclamation. All three club movements existed in a period when women’s time was meant to be spent on prescribed activities, centred around home and family. Woman’s designated sphere was the domestic space of home, in a society built on the ideology of separate spheres. This thesis suggests that the clubs, which were generally home-based and built around and within woman’s existing sphere, were spaces where women reclaimed some of the temporal autonomy denied to them in society. While critics have explored the idea of women having a different experience of time, there has not been a study which views these literary clubs as a separate experience of women’s time. The thesis will use evidence from primary and secondary sources to demonstrate that the clubwomen viewed their activities as separate from, and time intentionally claimed from, prescribed temporal pursuits. This was time claimed purely for leisure and self-serving, which was not an accepted or prescribed way for a woman with or without family responsibilities to spend her time. This thesis will claim that women used their clubs as spaces for exercising temporal autonomy.