The Women Who Sold Books Door to Door—and the Men Who Threatened to Kill Them
Before public libraries reached remote America, traveling book canvassers brought Bibles, Mark Twain, and Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs to scattered homes. Most peddlers were men, but some publishers recruited women to sell health and hygiene books to female readers. Three nineteenth-century memoirs, examined by scholar Jolie Braun, reveal the physical hardships and social hostility these women faced—including one man who told a canvasser he would murder his own sister before letting her do such work.
A northern California peddler named Harriet Wasson Styer described a man telling her that, if she were his sister, he would murder her rather than allow her to canvass.
- ajb
In the UK, the state has a conflicted relationship with mobile vending. On the one hand it is controversial to restrict commerce in a free society; on the other, there is an increasing aversion to being called to the door, or offered goods in the street. Technically you are would be required to have a "Pedlar's certificate", but there is a right to obtain one unless you are known to be of "bad character". "pedlar" is a very old word today hardly used except in the phrase 'drug pedlar'; and you cannot obtain such a certificate except by application at a police station, a rule unchanged since 1870. There are only a few thousand people with this licence and most street sellers probably don't have one (this does not include sellers at a fixed "pitch", who need a different (and more expensive and scarce) licence from the local council).
- fhdkweig
Encyclopedias were sold that way in the 1980s. Someone would just randomly knock on doors selling them. My parents had a few "A" volumes of various encyclopedias because they would sell the first book cheap (or free) and ask you to subscribe to a mailing for the rest.
- jdw64
>if she were his sister, he would murder her rather than allow her to canvass.
Looking at this, I really feel that social norms have changed a lot.
In each era, women's rights have shifted back and forth—sometimes equal to men's, sometimes lower.
These things keep changing from generation to generation, and I'm curious how they'll change in future generations.