There’s a reason antidemocratic leaders often persecute authors and ban literature: Books hold the power to undermine poisonous norms, harmful social constructs and oppressive governments.

Even more powerful than books alone are book clubs and reading groups. When resistance is afoot, book clubs are often buzzing. Not only can the clubs help politically inflamed members motivate themselves, and each other, to read relevant books ― 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century ― it’s a ready-made reason for friends to gather and talk about the anxieties and ideas du jour.

So it makes sense that, as Ruth Graham reported in Slate last week, the election of President Donald J. Trump has galvanized book clubs. Graham’s mother, and her colleague’s mother (the vast majority of book clubbers are women and over 45), reported reading or considering more political fare in recent months, from The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead to Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. Plus, Graham noticed, there are a rash of new, explicitly political book clubs, some online and some in-person.

As social networks that emphasize the exchange of thought, book clubs have always had a civic-minded side. Benjamin Franklin’s famous book club, Junto, established in 1727, brought men together to talk about business, literature, philosophy and politics. Like many clubs, including women’s clubs, that followed, Junto allowed members to supplement a lack in formal education. For those of humble (like Franklin) or otherwise unprivileged origins, reading groups were an ideal avenue to learning. Enslaved people were barred from learning to read, but freedmen and women in the northern states formed literary discussion groups for similar ends. Eventually Franklin’s group became a driving force behind civic projects like the first public lending library and a volunteer fire department.

Women’s book clubs, in particular, have a subversive history. Up until quite recently, women getting together to gab about books was viewed as suspicious rather than silly and self-indulgent. Talking about ideas was the provenance of men, much like higher education and politics. All the way back in the 1630s, Anne Hutchinson held a Bible study group for women at her home, at which she and the other ladies could continue talking about Scripture after the minister’s sermon. The group quickly grew so popular that she sometimes held meetings to which men were invited. In short order, the Puritan establishment became suspicious of her popular gathering and the theological discussions it held; in 1638, she was banished for promulgating a heretical doctrine. At her trial, Governor John Winthrop accused her of having “maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.”

Women’s political and civic improvement groups, most notably the consciousness-raising groups popularized by second-wave feminists, followed in the same tradition as reading groups. Often there wasn’t a clear distinction. Not only was women seeking education subversive in itself for centuries, talking about ideas often led women into acting on them, writing and speaking publicly about their ideals. Feminism, for example. In 1839, the principal of a girls’ seminary in New Hampshire wrote a circular urging both students and alumnae to read and write together not only for their own improvement, but for “the elevation of our sex universally.” (Sarah Sleeper, the principal in question, also urged women to serve as evangelical Protestant missionaries in order to save “the heathen,” so a bit of a mixed bag.)