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Cambridge, MA: Boston Women's Teachers' Group, Inc
Erscheinungsjahr
1995
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
In the fiction of contemporary working-class women writers we see a range of interior reconceptualizations of home. Home is reimagined as the "steady comfort of a woman moving through the house" in Barbara Smith's story "Home," presented symbolically as a quilt two sisters in different class situations contest for in Alice Walker's well known "Everyday Use," offered as more than a privatized white dream house in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street. 4 In each instance the yearning of the working-class daughter/ writer for a synthesis of external and internal homes is reconfigured through the gift of the writing. I want to conclude by looking at the relationship between class identity, theorizing, and language. In a 1978 issue of Radical Teacher Richard Ohmann asks -- and I'm paraphrasing in a crude way -- why workers aren't Marxists the way academics are Marxists? He mentions Basil Bernstein's research on language development, particularly regarding hypotheses about the "restricted" language in the homes of workers, and the "elaborated" codes of middle class -- in this case -- British households. 9 3 Even itinerant organizers like Mother Jones had a clearly internalized sense of home. In more contemporary women's coal mining music this sense of connection to home remains, but not uncritically. In a 1982 song called "Coal Mining Woman," Hazel Dickens addresses her union "brothers": "I've got the woman coal miner blues/Just like you, I've got the right to choose/ A job with decent pay, a better chance to make my way,/ And if you can't stand by me, don't stand in my way."