Contents:
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. Introduction -"Mind amongst the Spindles" Chapter One.
The Prospects for Fiction: The Working Woman's Bard: Full Development or Self-Restraint: Sylvia Jenkins Cook was born and grew up in Belfast, N. She has published previously on the literature of working-class and poor people and on the literature of the American South.
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.
Post a new comment. Mill worker and Offering editor Harriet Farley, in particular Sylvia J Cook - Oxford. Project MUSE Mission Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Description based on print version record. Of True Work American Poetry in the Age of Whitman and DickinsonPraised by Charles Dickens in his American Notes, the Offering was as much a part of transatlantic literary culture as the organ of Transcendentalism, a fact alluded to in the Idyl in Book X, in a conversation that moves easily from Brook Farm to the equally profound experiment of Lowell.
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. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Academic Skip to main content.
Choose your country or region Close. Louisa May Alcott Lied to Me and Other Matters of Feminist HistoryThe idea that there was ever some kind of golden age when all mothers spent their time frolicking with their children and making home-made play clay is a collective delusion, one created almost entirely by literature , movies, and television.
This vital new book traces the hopes and. Women ;s bodies, then, became the.
The Industrial Revolution meant more work outside the home, for men and women , but it was the relative independence that women especially young women gained from cash wages that freaked everyone out. Working Women, Literary Ladies: Sylvia J Cook - Oxford.
Working Women, Literary Ladies explores. Notes of a Man with a Cat on his Head: The Industrial Revolution and. Working Women , Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration.