Dirty work : domestic service in progressive-era women's fiction / Ann Mattis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mattis, Ann, author.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), issuing body.

Series:

Class, culture

Class : culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Household employees in literature--20th century.

Household employees in literature.

Women household employees--In literature--History and criticism.

Women household employees.

African American women household employees--In literature--History and criticism.

African American women household employees.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (221 pages).

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor, Michigan : University of Michigan Press, [2019]

System Details:

text file

Summary:

Dirty Work sheds light on the complex relationships between women employers and their household help in the early 20th century through their representations in literature, including women's magazines, conduct manuals, and particularly female-authored fiction. Domestic service brought together women from different classes, races, and ethnicities, and with it, a degree of social anxiety as upwardly mobile young women struggled to construct their identities in a changing world. The book focuses on the works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Anzia Yezierska, and Fannie Hurst and their various depictions of the maid/mistress relationship, revealing "a feminized and racialized brand of class hegemony." Not only did modern servants become configured as racial, hygienic, and social threats to the emergent ideal of the nuclear family, they played critical rhetorical roles in first-wave feminism and the New Negro movements. Dirty Work argues that these racial and class conflicts fundamentally shaped modern American domesticity, femininity, and fiction by female authors of the period. Deploying a materialist feminist and new modernist approach, and examining a diverse archive of modern American texts, including home economics pamphlets, undercover journalism, autobiography, reform tracts, training manuals, experimental modernism, and gothic fiction, Mattis reveals how U.S. domestic service was the political unconscious of cultural narratives that attempted to define modern domesticity and progressive femininity in monolithic terms.

Contents:

1 Managing the Servant Girl Problem in Charlotte Perk Gilman's Progressive Home p. 25

2 The Traffic of Immigrant Domestics in Gertrude Stein's Three Lives p. 53

3 A Gothic Romance: Mistresses and Servants in Edith Wharton's Ghost Stories p. 81

4 New Black Women and Servitude in Jessie Fauset's The Sleeper Wokes and Nella Larsen's Passing p. 111

5 The Oedipalization of Life in Fannie Hurst's Servant Melodramas p. 149.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 206-221) and index.

Description based on information from publisher.

ISBN:

9780472125074

0472125079

OCLC:

1076274124

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.