Bodies of work : civic display and labor in industrial Pittsburgh / Edward Slavishak.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Slavishak, Edward Steven.

Series:

Body, commodity, text

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Working class--Pennsylvania--Pittsburgh--History.

Working class.

Industrialization--Social aspects--Pennsylvania--Pittsburgh.

Industrialization.

Industrialization--Social aspects.

City promotion.

History.

Pennsylvania--Pittsburgh.

Industries--Social aspects--Pennsylvania--Pittsburgh.

Industries.

Industries--Social aspects.

City promotion--Pennsylvania--Pittsburgh--History.

Pittsburgh (Pa.)--History.

Pittsburgh (Pa.).

Physical Description:

x, 354 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2008.

Summary:

By the End of the Nineteenth Century, Pittsburgh emerged as a major manufacturing center in the United States. Its rise as a leading producer of steel, glass, and coal was fueled by machine technology and mass immigration, developments that fundamentally changed the industrial workplace. Because Pittsburgh's major industries were almost exclusively male and renowned for their physical demands, the male working body came to symbolize multiple often contradictory narratives about strength and vulnerability, mastery and exploitation. In Bodies of Work, Edward Slavishak explores how Pittsburgh and the working body were symbolically linked in civic celebrations, the research of social scientists, the criticisms of labor reformers, advertisements, and workers' self-representations. Combining labor and cultural history with visual culture studies, he chronicles a heated contest to define Pittsburgh's essential character at the turn of the twentieth century, and he describes how that contest was conducted largely through the production of competing images. Slavishak focuses on the workers whose bodies came to epitomize Pittsburgh, the men engaged in the arduous physical labor demanded by the city's metals, glass, and coal industries. At the same time, he emphasizes how conceptions of Pittsburgh as quintessentially male limited representations of women in the industrial workplace.

Contents:

The magic of the nineteenth century: industrial change and work in Pittsburgh

Working-class muscle in the battle of homestead

The working body as a civic image

The Pittsburgh survey and the body as evidence

"Delicately built": the "problem" of working women in Pittsburgh

Hiding and displaying the broken body

Epilogue: "That's work, and that's what people like to watch!".

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [319]-343) and index.

ISBN:

9780822342069

0822342065

9780822342250

0822342251

OCLC:

209335239