THE RADCLIFFE LADIES' READING CLUB

Four 18-year-old girls spend a year at Radcliffe College in the autumn of 1955, exploring books as they plan for their futures.

When Tess Collins arrives at Radcliffe for her first year of college on a scholarship, she is thrilled at the opportunity to make her own future and get away from her constantly arguing parents and fighting brothers in Ohio. She might not have much money, but she has plenty of plans about how she will be top of her class. Her roommate, Caroline Hanson, is her polar opposite: gorgeous, wealthy, fun-loving, and generous with her time and possessions. The pair become friends with the young women in the adjoining room: Evie Miller, a boy-crazy farmer’s daughter with a mostly steady boyfriend from back home in New York, and Merritt Weber, the artistically inclined daughter of an academic father in San Francisco whose mother died when she was 15. The story follows them as they join a book club run by Alice Campbell, a once-married woman from Chicago determined to find her own way in life by running a small bookstore in Cambridge. The women read a variety of books as Alice pushes them to think deeply about what it has meant to be a (White) woman across the centuries and how, while much might have changed when it came to (White) women’s rights, there was still much that hadn’t. Rather than being a book about nothing of importance—as Mark Twain said of Emma, a book from their book club—this is a book in which (after a slow start) the women experience joy and tragedy as they try to figure out who they are, what they stand for, and what their futures might hold. Themes of bullying, alcoholism, wealth disparity, (White) women’s rights, assault, and rape are all addressed.

A story of female freedom and constraints that doesn’t shy away from the trauma—and joy—that faced U.S. women in the 1950s.