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The Personal and the Political in American Working-Class Literature, 1850–1939
Defining the Radical Romance
The Personal and the Political in American Working-Class Literature, 1850–1939
Defining the Radical Romance
Description
As working women invaded the public space of the factory in the nineteenth century, they challenged Victorian notions of female domesticity and chastity. With virtue at the forefront of discussions regarding working women, aspects of working-class women’s culture—fashion, fiction, and dance halls—become vivid signifiers for moral impropriety, and attempts to censure these activities become overt attempts to censure female sexuality in the workplace. The Personal and the Political in American Working-Class Literature, 1850–1939 argues that these informal and often ignored “trifles” of female community provided the building blocks for female solidarity in the workplace. While most critical approaches to working-class fiction emphasize female suffering rather than agency, this book argues that working women themselves viewed aspects of consumer culture and new avenues for courtship as extensions of their rights as breadwinners. The strike itself is an intense moment of political upheaval that lends itself to more extensive personal and sexual freedoms. Through its analysis of strike novels, this book provides a fuller picture of working-class women as they simultaneously navigate new identities as “working ladies” and enter the dramatic and sometimes violent world of labor activism. This book is recommended for scholars of literary studies, women’s studies, and US history.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Lowell Experiment: Finery, Chastity, and an Emerging Working-class Culture
Chapter 2: Maud Matchin: A Working-Class American Beauty in John Hay’s The Breadwinners (1896)
Chapter 3: Strikers at the Ball: Radical Romances of the Great Shirtwaist Strike, Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker (1909) and Comrade Yetta (1913)
Chapter 4: Romance on the Picket Line: Mary Heaton Vorse’s Strike! (1930) and Dorothy Myra Page’s Gathering Storm (1932)
Chapter 5: Violence and Female Sexuality in Sherwood Anderson’s Beyond Desire (1932) and William Rollins’s The Shadow Before (1934)
Chapter 6: Romance as Redemption in Olive Tilford Dargan’s Call Home the Heart (1932), Stone Came Rolling (1935) and Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread (1932)
Conclusion
Works Cited
Product details
| Published | 06 Sep 2019 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 196 |
| ISBN | 9781498581219 |
| Imprint | Lexington Books |
| Series | Innovation and Activism in American Women's Writing |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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