Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration

by Sylvia J Cook

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198043867
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/29/2000
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	705 KB

About the Author

Sylvia Jenkins Cook was born and grew up in Belfast, N. Ireland. She was educated at Queen's University and at the University of Michigan is currently Professor of english at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She has published previously on the literature of working-class and poor people and on the literature of the American South.

Table of Contents

Introduction -"Mind amongst the Spindles"
Chapter One. "A Tangled Skein": Early Factory Women, Self-Reliance, and Self-Sacrifice
Chapter Two. "Ideal Mill Girls: The Lowell Offering and Female Aspiration
Chapter Three. Across the Gulf: The Transcendentalists, the Dial, and Margaret Fuller
Chapter Four. The Prospects for Fiction: Male Romantic Novelists and Women's Social Reality
Chapter Five. Fables of Lowell: The First Factory Fictions
Chapter Six. The Working Woman's Bard: Lucy Larcom and the Factory Epic
Chapter Seven. Full Development or Self-Restraint: Middle-Class Women and Working-Class Elevation
Chapter Eight. "Beautiful Language and Difficult Ideas": From New England Factory to New York Sweatshop

Editorial Reviews

"Cook's investigation of the literariness of women workers in industrializing America produces a revelatory cultural narrative. Her examination of the tension between 'the life of the mind' and the 'life of the body' as this is played out over time and populations allows her to distill and highlight the complex interaction of gender and class. Opening up an array of associations, literal and imaginative, political and literary, Cook contributes significantly to the burgeoning work on the history of class in the U.S."—Amy Schrager Lang, Professor of Humanities and English, Syracuse University

"Cook's investigation of the literariness of women workers in industrializing America produces a revelatory cultural narrative. Her examination of the tension between 'the life of the mind' and the 'life of the body' as this is played out over time and populations allows her to distill and highlight the complex interaction of gender and class. Opening up an array of associations, literal and imaginative, political and literary, Cook contributes significantly to the burgeoning work on the history of class in the U.S."—Amy Schrager Lang, Professor of Humanities and English, Syracuse University

"Contribut[es] to the field a valuable new understanding of the prominence of women workers, as both authors and literary subjects, in advancing literary innovation." —Legacy

From the Publisher