Books for the Young by Caroline Hewins

Abstract

Children’s literature was formally distinguished as a distinct category of literature during the Progressive Era in the United States, largely through the work of professional “book women” like children’s librarians, publishers, and teachers. This chapter examines one of the first attempts to formalize a selection of existing literature into a canon of children’s books, the 1882 pamphlet Books for the Young by Caroline M. Hewins. While this booklist is widely acknowledged by children’s literature scholars to be a major milestone in the formation of the field, the actual texts that comprise the list are understudied. In this chapter, we analyze the corpus of books named in this list by applying rhetorical tagging and focusing on the subset of books designated by Hewins for specific gendered readership (i.e. books especially for boys and especially for girls). We argue that Hewins assigns a narrower scope of text types to the category of books girls will like, which sets a precedent for future gendering of readership for the field of children’s literature well into the 20th century.