Women and Work: The Labors of Self-Fashioning
Editor: Christine Leiren Mower and Susanne Weil
Date Of Publication: Mar 2011
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-2422-4
Isbn: 1-4438-2422-4
While issues surrounding women and work may be more subtle today than in the past, problems of workplace equity, child-rearing, and domestic labor pose problems of balance that continue to evade solution as women today face substantial shifts in the meanings and practices of marriage, work, and reproduction amid a globalized economy. The essays in Women and Work: The Labors of Self-Fashioning explore how nineteenth- and twentieth-century US and British writers represent the work of being women—where “work” is defined broadly to encompass not only paid labor inside and outside the home, but also the work of performing femininity and domesticity. How did nineteenth- and twentieth-century US and British writers revise then-contemporary social assumptions about who should be performing work, and for what purpose? How fully did these writers perceive the class implications of their arguments for taking jobs outside the home? How does work, both inside and outside the home, contribute to female identity and, conversely, how does it promote what legal theorist Kenji Yoshino terms the demands of “covering”—women’s strategic use of stereotypes of femininity and masculinity to succeed in the marketplace?

In articles appropriate for both upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in literature and literary history, women’s studies, feminist and gender studies, contributors engage these questions, covering both canonical and popular “middlebrow” nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers such as Gilman, Cather, Alcott, Schreiner, Wharton, Le Sueur, Gissing, Wood, Lewis and Mitchell. Women and Work will also interest scholars concerned with this developing discourse.

Christine Leiren Mower is Adjunct Professor of English and Women Studies at Seattle University. Her teaching and research centers on race, class, and women’s reproduction. Her prose has been published in American Literature and The Bellingham Review; her fiction and poetry have appeared in Feminist Studies, A Room of One’s Own, The Denver Quarterly, New American Writing and Tampa Review. Christine is the author of two books, the most recent a memoir, Lipstick Moons, chronicling her mother’s journey with Alzheimer’s.

Susanne Weil is Associate Professor of English and Humanities and Director of the Honors Program at Centralia College, Washington. Her teaching and research focus on economic issues in American literature: how Twain’s business involvement affected his later writing, and how women are represented in the literature of the labor movement. Susanne also studies spirituality in medieval literature: her work on Beowulf was included in Bloom’s Guide to the epic (2008).

“Women and Work offers a timely treatment of a timeless problem: the dilemmas working women experience as they seek to balance the often conflicting demands of women’s work. Mower and Weil have compiled an outstanding collection of writings about how women writers have historically conceptualized and addressed those demands in their fiction.”

—Priscilla Wald, Duke University, author of Constituting Americans and Cultures and Carriers

“Encompassing a rich diversity of critical approaches and primary texts, Mower’s and Weil’s collection is a significant contribution to contemporary debates about labor, class, race, and gender in nineteenth- and twentieth-century US and British writings. The authors show how the routinely-disavowed reality of women’s work, paid and unpaid, domestic and otherwise, has provided both literary occasion and preoccupation for writers representing a variety of class positions. The comparative, trans-Atlantic focus is especially innovative and welcome.”

—Lori Merish, Georgetown University, author of Sentimental Materialism

Price Uk Gbp: 44.99
Price Us Usd: 67.99

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)