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.