Anne Hutchinson, looking for something to do on the 12-week journey from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634 on a ship that did not offer midnight buffets, casinos, fitness centers or Netflix, gathered women passengers to discuss the Bible.
The all-male crew went ballistic, shutting down what arguably was America’s first book club. Hutchinson, a Puritan religious reformer, kept organizing clubs in Massachusetts and was banished from the colony for flouting male authority.
We know how it goes when men tell women they can’t do something—am I right, ladies?
Fast-forward 392 years. Today, an estimated 13 million Americans participate in book clubs, some 90 percent of them women. See how that works?
“They were right on the money,” said Lauren Zimmerman, owner of Writer’s Block Bookstore on Park Avenue, which hosts four book clubs with 98 percent female membership. She wants to start another club in the spa at the Alfond Inn “because who goes to spas, right? They’re all excited about having a club at the spa.”
So where are all the men? “When I opened the store (in 2014), I heard there were clubs run by men. I don’t know where they are now. If they’re out there, I haven’t seen them.”
Maybe they went the way of an all-guy club—the first and last such club that I have ever joined—formed around that time. It just stopped after two meetings and no one can remember why. “I do not think the failure was because we were men,” recalled Howard, another former member. “It was largely due to a lack of organization and purpose.”
Howard has it backwards. It lacked purpose and organization because we were men. As a herd, men are simply not wired emotionally for book clubbing, which is as alien to the male psyche as splitting a lunch check evenly is to a group of women.
“Women’s clubs usually involve some degree of hosting—the providing of snacks and so forth—which is usually a women’s area of endeavor,” said my friend Jean. “A lot of men I know are either unused to organizing social events or, sorry, just too plain lazy.”
That’s true, but not the main reason men would rather be trapped for an hour in a Michaels craft store than join the ladies for snacking and schmoozing in a book club. It’s just not their idea of fun, like pickup basketball and poker.
Women use book clubs as an excuse to socialize. Men use poker as an excuse to play poker. For years, I played poker with a group of buddies from the Orlando Sentinel at the home of an editor whose idea of “hosting” was to order take-out pizza and buy a case of beer.
We’d play for five or six hours on Fridays. The next morning, Candy, my wife, would ask about the gathering.
“So what did you all talk about all night?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did anyone talk about their families, their kids, what’s going in their lives?”
“Of course not. We talked about poker.”
I asked some guy friends, all highly literate, if they had ever been in a book club, and if not, why not? There was an undercurrent of go-away-and-don’t-bother-me in their replies.
“I’m a negative on that! Don’t want to read books I don’t want to read.”
“I have never been a member. I don’t care what the author was trying to tell me. I either enjoyed his book or I didn’t.”
“I was at a book club for one meeting. It confirmed that I’m an introvert. My pleasure in reading is in the connections I make while I read. It’s all internal.”
“I never joined a book club for the same reason I never joined a shot put club: I could be satisfied doing it alone in the backyard.”
John Perry, retired from the newspaper industry, leads the nonfiction book club at the University Club of Winter Park. It usually draws more men than women with such bodice-ripping titles as The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy and 1929: The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History.
The day I was there, five men and three women showed up to discuss a book called We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. It was a sober yet lively exchange of ideas.
I asked Perry his take on why so many more women do book club. “I think women are more intellectually inclined and more social,” he said. “Men are more inclined to be loners. I think it’s the testosterone.”
What can break men out of their testosterone daze? “I’ve been to many corporate meetings, and men talk about sports,” said Perry. “They can talk forever about whether it was a passed ball or a wild pitch.”
I also attended a session of the University Club’s historical fiction reading group, which favors such novels as The Four Winds, The Secrets We Kept and The Book Club for Troublesome Women—all relationship stories set in historic periods. There were 10 women and zero men. The chitchat told me right away I wasn’t in Kansas anymore playing poker with my buds:
“Good morning—love your blouse. And Gayle
—another fabulous necklace!” It’s an unbridgeable divide: Locker Room versus Powder Room. Fart Jokes versus Feelings.
Writer’s Block has hosted fiction, fantasy and romance clubs for years. In September, Zimmerman added a non-fiction club, in part to attract more men. She hopes.
“I’m looking for more topics that would interest men. They’re not going to come for romance. Maybe a Woodward book, or a biography of a world leader, or history—pick a period, any period. And then there’s business books—men like business books. Or a cookbook—men like to cook. I really don’t know the answer.”
In Zimmerman’s exasperation, you hear the primal scream of any woman who’s ever tried to change the ways of a man in her life—his wardrobe, diet, ratty old easy chair, spitting on the sidewalk, eating food off the floor, leaving the toilet seat up—am I right, ladies?
I admire Zimmerman’s valiant effort to lure men into the world of book clubbing alongside women. But false hope springs eternal. As Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw said: “All young women begin by believing they can change the men they marry. They can’t.”
Or as American philosopher and Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra (who rarely allowed a passed ball) put it: “If fans don’t want to come out to the ballpark, you can’t stop ’em.”