Bertha Mahony (1882-1969): A Pioneer for Children’s Literature

Bertha Mahony would have excelled at anything she put her mind to. The circumstances of her life and options available for women at the time led her to opening one of the first bookstores for children in Boston in 1916, under the ownership of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union.

After a tough and upward climb, the Bookshop for Boys and Girls was wildly successful, due to Mahony’s marketing genius which included events where she pulled in the public— art shows, meet the author, poetry readings for high school students—and creating a space that welcomed children, inviting them to touch the books, and sit and read for a while.

Today we are accustomed to children’s bookstores and children’s books sections in every bookstore, libraries with generous space and resources allotted to young minds and those who are rearing them, but at Mahony’s time, the idea of catering specifically to children and their parents through culture and secular philosophy, rather than through the local parish was new and went along with the progressive movement of the country.

In 1924, together with Elinor Whitney,  Mahony launched The Horn Book Magazine, the first magazine dedicated solely to children’s books, publishing, and writers, eventually ushering in the explosion that was children’s picture books.

Who is Bertha Mahony

Born Bertha Everett Mahony in Rockport, Massachusetts in 1882, Mahony felt the sting of discrimination early in her life due to her Irish immigrant roots. Her mother, Mary Lane Everett Mahony, died when she was eleven, but before she died, she brought the richness of the arts to young Bertha’s life mostly through music and reading. Bertha came to believe that reading is a gift that should be made available for all children.

Though guided toward teaching as a profession, she did not enjoy it. In 1902 she went to Simmons College, a new college for women in Boston.

Simmons College, now Simmons University, was just opening in 1902 when Bertha Mahony was admitted. She preferred the four-year program for Library Science but could not afford it so enrolled in the one-year Secretarial Studies course.

John Simmons, the founder of Simmons College, made his money manufacturing and selling ready-made suits, then later Boston real estate. Having no male heir, and wishing for his name to live on, he decided to found a college for women. Why women? In The Spirited Life: Bertha Mahony Miller and Children’s Books, Eulalie Steinmetz Ross writes:

“When John Simmons manufactured his ready-made suits, he had them cut in his shop and the pieces sent out to be sewn by women in their homes. He took a personal interest in the women and often visited them in Roxbury and the South End, thus coming to know well the circumstances of the untrained and uneducated female worker of the day.  By founding Simmons Female College, John Simmons was able to make a return to that class of women by whose labor as seamstresses he had laid the foundation of his own fortune”(32).

After Simmons, Bertha found a job at the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, a Boston nonprofit service agency formed to protect and promote the status of the working woman.

“It seemed singularly right for her, a working woman, to attend Simmons; it seemed equally so for her to become associated with the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union.

The Union had come into being on the first wave of the Women’s Liberation Movement which swept across the country the 1870s”(Ross 35).

Active from 1877-2006, this groundbreaking organization was founded by feminist and physician Harriet Clisby. Clisby, a vegetarian Swedenborgian, was born in London in 1830 and moved with her family to Australia. Swedenborgians believe in a mystical form of Christianity based on love and charity. Inspired by Elizabeth Blackwell to become a doctor, Clisby eventually found her way to Boston where she saw a great need and potential to help working women.

Read Nasty Women Writers post on Elizabeth Blackwell.
The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women—and Women to Medicine by Janice P. Nimura (2021)

Other early members of the WEIU include Louisa May Alcott and Julia Ward Howe. The WEIU created many ways to bring in revenue to support their aid foundation. They hosted a store for women to sell their crafts and products. The shop was very successful and open until 2004, spawning many women artists and businesses. The WEIU started the first school lunch program, the first credit union, and a family day care program in 1970. The list of services they provided and programs they initiated goes on and on including the first shelter for homeless and battered women in 1985.

I include all of the above detail so we can appreciate the amount of work and progress being made by and for women at this time. Though still relegated to traditionally approved  “women’s work,” glass ceilings were nevertheless broken in areas of leadership, professional mentoring, women working together professionally for the betterment of other women, and opening pathways for careers for women to apply their ambition.

Mahony worked at the WEIU in administrative positions under the tutelage of many strong female mentors. Ten years later she opened The Bookshop for Boys and Girls in Boston with assistance and guidance from powerful women, under the umbrella of the union.

She was also assisted by other professional women, especially librarians. Alice M. Jordan from the children’s room in the Boston Public Library, one of the first of its kind in the country, guided her in book recommendations as well as May Massee, a children’s librarian turned editor for the American Library Association’s Booklist, who would eventually become editor of Mahony’s books at Doubleday. Ann Carroll Moore’s “Children’s Room” in the New York Public Library was the model Mahony followed as she planned the design of her own bookshop.

Bertha Mahony decided to become a “bookwoman” after reading an article in The Atlantic Monthly stating it was a great profession for women to own and run a bookstore. In a speech delivered at a book conference in 1917, she said:

“Our bookshop for boys and girls exists, not simply to sell good books for children but to increase their love for books, because we believe that good books are so important as to be an essential part of life. We feel that the two main essentials are the power to think truly and the power to feel deeply and that these two essentials result in “preparedness for worthy action”(qtd in Ross 57).

Again, revealing Bertha Mahony’s creative genius and marketing savvy, the Bookshop created a book caravan, a van turned into a portable bookstore, that traveled around New England for several summers bringing books and reading to underserved rural communities.

In 1921 the Bookshop for Boys and Girls moved to new and bigger quarters at 270 Boylston Street and was beloved by the local community as well as travelers from out of town. One could sit and read or preview the books, find assistance from knowledgeable staff, and even get to know a doll house containing occupants with a history written by the staff.

The Horn Book Magazine

One of the outstanding features about Bertha Mahony and the opening of her bookshop was the list that she compiled and sent out to prospective book buyers, “Books for Boys and Girls—a Suggestive Purchase List” before the store was even open. 110 pages long containing 1200 titles with descriptions of books that she had scrupulously vetted, this was one of her main marketing strategies. She wanted this list to come out simultaneously with  the bookshop’s opening. Though she was discouraged against this by many arguing it was too big an investment, she fought for it and won.

This kernel idea and passion would become the cornerstone of Mahony’s work life, becoming a magazine and then books including Realms of Gold in Children’s Books.

Mahony became well-respected and highly influential in the literary world for her thorough understanding and comprehensive knowledge of children’s literature which she shared in her unique style with readers, publishers and bookstores for generations. Her first employees in the bookstore:

“Miss Sayward and Miss Howard also worked with Bertha on the buying guide of selected children’s books, which she had determined to distribute simultaneously with the opening of the Bookshop. No such commercial list had ever been published. The list was to be her primary piece of publicity; it was expensive to do and she took much criticism for undertaking it before the shop was fairly established. Yet Bertha persisted, basing her judgement on the years of experience she had in handling the advertising and publicity of the union. She was convinced the list would repay its cost in book orders, she was hopeful that it would bespeak the spirit of the Bookshop in the careful selectivity of its titles”(Ross 51).

The purchase list was a huge success. The Bookshop continued to update it every few years, changing its format several times to include the workings of the bookshop, more and new book recommendations, trends in children’s book publishing and the promotion of new writers, until it eventually became The Horn Book Magazine which Mahony founded with coworker Elinor Whitney.

“The Horn Book was the first magazine published anywhere that concerned itself exclusively with children’s books and reading. When Bertha Mahony and Elinor Whitney founded the periodical in 1924, they sought to put into words some of the joyful noise being made in the Bookshop in celebrations of children’s books by writers, artists, editors, librarians, educators and boys and girls”(Ross 107).

Mahony decided on the themes and solicited articles from writers she thought would capture them best. She not only solicited them, she hounded them for the articles they committed to. She began solely as an editor but eventually moved into writing editorials which became a signature piece of each issue.

Elinor Whitney (1889-1980), co-founder and assistant editor of The Horn Book Magazine was also an author. Her book, Tod of the Fens (1928), was the recipient of a Newbery Honor. She joined the bookshop in 1919 and continued to work with Mahony for the rest of her life.

In 1936 both Mahony and Whitney retired from the bookstore to focus exclusively on The Horn Book Magazine, recruiting more and more women to join their staff as they grew.

Realms of Gold in Children’s Books

Realms of Gold in Children’s Books was met to high acclaim when published in 1929. It was a compilation of the lists Mahony and Whitney had created since the opening of the bookstore. It ended up being over 700 pages — and that is with the elimination of the section about illustrated books which was published separately later.

Picture books were coming into their own in the 1920s and by the 30s, thanks to less expensive printing processes, a whole new field was burgeoning. The deleted section was published on its own as Contemporary Illustrators of Children’s Books.

Realms of Gold in Children’s Books was not only an invaluable reference but a great and entertaining read.

In the book, Mahony and Whitney attempted to:

“Tell the story of children’s books from the first one, the hornbook, to the glorious present day, with biographies of authors and illustrators and favorite quotations from prose and poetry thrown in in the nature of fireworks”(Ross 94).

The Horn Book Magazine is still in publication in both print and electronic format and celebrating its centennial this year. On this website you will find a virtual history exhibit.

Bertha Mahony and Elinor Whitney are Nasty Women Writers.

© Theresa C. Dintino 2024

Ross, Eulalie Steinmetz. The Spirited Life: Bertha Mahony Miller and Children’s Books. Boston, MA. The Horn Book Incorporated. 1973.