Working Women, Literary Ladies

Abstract

This book explores the mental and literary awakening that many working-class women in the United States experienced when they left home to work in factories early in the 19th century. It examines the ways that their hopes for lives of full development were fulfilled, exploited, and often disappointed — a process repeated when immigrant women entered factories and sweatshops early in the 20th century. It investigates their literary productions, from the New England factory magazine, the Lowell Offering, to Emma Goldman's periodical, Mother Earth; from Lucy Larcom's epic poem of women operatives, An Idyl of Work, to Theresa Malkiel's novel of sweatshop workers, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker. Working women's fascination with books and writing evolved in the context of an American romanticism that encouraged ideals of self-reliance, although not in factory “girls”. Their efforts to pursue a life of the mind while engaged in manual labor also coincided with the emergence of middle-class women writers from private lives into the literary marketplace. However, while middle-class women risked forfeiting their femininity by trying to earn money, factory women were accused of betraying their class by attempting to be literary. The book traces the romantic literariness of several generations of working-class women and the broader literary responses to them from male romantic authors, popular novelists, and union writers for the Knights of Labor. The most significant literary interaction, however, is with middle-class women writers, many of whom responded sympathetically to workers' economic and social inequities, but balked at promoting their artistic and intellectual equality.

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