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Working Women in American Literature, 1865-1950
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2020
Summary
Working Women in American Literature, 1865–1950 consists of eight original essays by literary, historical, and multicultural critics on the subject of working women in late-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century American literature. The volume examines how the American working woman has been presented, misrepresented, and underrepresented in American realistic and naturalistic literature (1865–1930), and by later authors influenced by realism and naturalism. Points explored include: the historical vocational realities of working women (e.g., factory workers, seamstresses, maids, teachers, writers, prostitutes, etc.); the distortions in literary representations of female work; the ways in which these representations still inform the lives of working women today; and new perspectives from queer theory, immigrant studies, and race and class analyses.
These essays draw on current feminist thought while remaining mindful of the historicity of the context. The essayists discuss important women writers of the period (for instance, Ellen Glasgow, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rachel Crothers, Willa Cather, and the understudied Ann Petry), as well as canonical writers like Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, and William Dean Howells. The discussions touch on a variety of literary and artistic genres: novels, short stories, other forms of fiction, biographies, dramas, and films. In the introductory essay and throughout the collection, the term “working women in the United States” is deconstructed; the historical and cultural definitions of “work,” and the words “work in America” are redefined through the lens of genders.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2020
ISBN-Print
978-1-4985-4678-2
ISBN-Online
978-1-4985-4679-9
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
158
Product type
Edited Book
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Introduction No access
Chapter One: The Female Domestic in Naturalistic Fiction No access
Chapter Two: Not a Common Shop-Girl No access
Chapter Three: Women Doctors in Henry James and William Dean Howells No access
Chapter Four: Women, Work, and Cross-Class Alliances in the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman No access
Chapter Five: Naturalism and the New Woman in Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground No access
Chapter Six: Work, Race, and the Performance of Gender in Ann Petry’s The Street No access
Chapter Seven: Feminism, Sentimentality, and Realism in Rachel Crothers’s Working-Women Plays No access
Chapter Eight: Career Women in 1940s Cinema No access
