Women Who Sold Books Door to Door

Three nineteenth-century memoirs reveal the world of traveling book canvassers in the U.S. before public libraries, when salespeople carried sample books to homes and businesses, took subscription orders, later delivered the volumes and collected payment. Popular items included Bibles, farming and health manuals, biographies, and fiction; Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs and Mark Twain’s works were among bestsellers. The subscription model enabled some titles to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Although most peddlers were men, publishers recruited women to sell books on health and hygiene to female readers and to capitalize on customers’ sympathy, creating a distinct niche for women canvassers.

The memoirs of Annie Nelles Dumond (1868), J. W. Likins (1874), and Harriet Wasson Styer (1881) show why women entered the trade and what they endured. Dumond turned to canvassing after difficult marriages, concealed her past with a mourning bonnet, and took pride in spreading knowledge. Likins supported an ill husband but recorded customers’ pity and hostility from men who demanded she return home. Styer mixed exhilaration at wild landscapes and visits to lumber camps with threats of violence, bed bugs, and filthy stagecoaches. Together the accounts present a job that offered income and adventure but also serious physical hardships and social sanctions for women who defied gender expectations.