Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Rice, Kathleen E

Titel

Feminism and the Working Girl: Women’s Popular Literature and the Movement That Shaped It, 1894-1939

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Early years of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of the female office worker in America’s urban centers, and with it, the working girl in popular literature. A product of feminist accomplishments, working-girl literature’s growing popularity paralleled the trajectory of the women’s movement in the 1900s and 1910s. The 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment is when many scholars mark the end of American feminism’s first wave. As this time period intersects with the growth of working-girl literature, my cultural analysis of archival evidence suggests the discourse conveyed in popular fiction and nonfiction helped further the feminist movement beyond women’s suffrage. By employing a triangulated approach with a focus on popular novels, advice guides, and editorial works, I propose an historical interconnectivity between the personal politics, ambitions, and strategies employed by women in the wake of America’s suffrage movement. Together, the primary sources provide multifaceted examples of the feminist movement’s impact on working women’s everyday lives, what measures the movement had yet to achieve, and how women planned to accomplish its goals of social, political, and economic equality. The triangulation of sources reflects Stephen Greenblatt’s “concept of culture,” with each genre exhibiting tensions between its key tenets of “constraint and mobility” (225). Previously established gendered limitations are examined, challenged, and disrupted through an interconnected process presented within the pages of working-girl literature. Editorial works articulate social structures and cultural boundaries, examine values, and question conformity; advice guides disrupt cultural boundaries by providing methodology for achieving agency; and popular novels challenge gender and labor-related cultural boundaries, enforcing mobilizing behaviors. Each chapter of this work illustrates the development of working-girl literature in order to reevaluate the notion that feminism’s first wave ended with the Nineteenth Amendment. Included in this study are working-girl novels by Edna Ferber, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Viña Delmar, Ruth Suckow, Anzia Yezierska, Margaret Ayers Barnes, and Faith Baldwin. Each work was selected for its female authorship and narrative focus on young women beginning their careers in urban office settings in the early decades of the twentieth century. A cultural analysis of these novel—alongside articles in popular periodicals from contributors such as Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, Margaret Murray Washington, Dorothy Dix, and Lois Long, and advice manuals by Marjorie Hillis and Grace Mack—provides greater cultural insight into the feminist discourse of freedom sustained by working-girl literature.