Working Women Literary Ladies

Working Women, Literary Ladies explores the simultaneous entry of working-class women in the United States into wage-earning factory labor and into opportunities for mental and literary development. It is the first book to examine the fascinating exchange between the work and literary spheres for laboring women in the rapidly industrializing America of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As women entered the public sphere as workers, their opportunities for intellectual growth expanded, even as those same opportunities were often tightly circumscribed by the factory owners who were providing them. These developments, both institutional and personal, opened up a range of new possibilities for working-class women that profoundly affected women of all classes and the larger social fabric. Cook examines the extraordinary and diverse literary productions of these working women, ranging from their first New England magazine of belles lettres, The Lowell Offering, to Emma Goldman's periodical, Mother Earth; from Lucy Larcom's epic poem of female factory life, An Idyl of Work, to Theresa Malkiel's fictional account of sweatshop workers in New York, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker. This vital new book traces the hopes and tensions generated by the expectations of working-class women as they created a wholly new way of being alive in the world.

This is an exploration of the simultaneous entry of working-class women in the US into wage-earning factory labour and into opportunities for mental and literary development. The text traces the hopes and tensions generated by expectations of their gender and class.

This book explores the simultaneous entry of working-class women in the United States into wage-earning factory labor and into opportunities for mental and literary development. It traces the hopes and tensions generated by expectations of their gender and class from the first New England operatives in the early nineteenth century to immigrant sweatshop workers in the early twentieth.

"Record numbers of women began entering the American labor force in the late 1800s, their experiences composed largely of the drudgery of the factory or the monotony of the sales floor. This feminine mass entry into the workplace sparked thirty-five years of debate, with proponents protesting employers' "moral corruption" of women and detractors arguing for a return to woman's "proper" sphere, the home - evidence of the late-Victorian desire to regulate female sexuality. Authors of fiction were quick to respond: Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, Anzia Yezierska - these and others portrayed working girls in forms as diverse as tenement tales, labor romances, and novels of upward mobility. By joining the period debate about the working girl, her literary imaginers helped shape it." "While modern treatments of labor fiction, including those by feminist scholars, have largely ignored these portrayals, Tales of the Working' Girl does not. Reevaluating both well-known and forgotten texts, this new study by Laura Hapke examines the myriad ways in which the working girl was envisioned by considering the artistic goals and strategies of those who depicted her. Hapke explores to what extent writers acknowledged women's own responses to the controversy, scrutinizes differences in male and female authors' portrayals, and traces the evolution of the working girl as fictional heroine from the slum melodramas of the 1890s to the strike fiction of the 1910s to the economic ascension novels of the 1920s." "Marked by lucid prose and graced by historical photographs and illustrations, Tales of the Working Girl is an important contribution to women's studies, American studies, and labor history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Your tastes, you say, are fixed; if they are so, you must be doubly careful to ensure their gratification. If you cannot make them subservient to external circumstances, you should certainly, if it be in your power, choose a situation in which circumstances will be subservient to them. If you are convinced that you could not adopt the tastes of another, it will be absolutely necessary for your happiness to live with one whose tastes are similar to your own.

This book was first published in 1929. The working woman was not, a Victorian institution. The word spinster disproves any upstart origin for the sisterhood of toil. Nor was she as a literary figure the discovery of Victorian witers in search of fresh material. Chaucer included unmemorable working women and Charlotte Bronte in 'Shirley' had Caroline Helstone a reflection that spinning 'kept her servants up very late'. It seems that the Victorians see the women worker as an object of oity, portrated in early nineteenth century as a victim of long hours, injustice and unfavourable conditions. This volume looks at the working woman in British industries and professions from 1832 to1850.

The debut novel from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the most eloquent and gifted writers of contemporary fiction” (The New York Times). “Munro has an unerring talent for uncovering the extraordinary in the ordinary.”—Newsweek Rural Ontario, 1940s. Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father’s fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women—her mother, an agnostic, opinionated woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother’s boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence. Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro’s unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.