As working women invaded the public space of the factory in the nineteenth century, they challenged Victorian notions of female domesticity and chastity. With virtue at the forefront of discussions regarding working women, aspects of working-class women’s culture—fashion, fiction, and dance halls—become vivid signifiers for moral impropriety, and attempts to censure these activities become overt attempts to censure female sexuality in the workplace. The Personal and the Political in American Working-Class Literature, 1850–1939 argues that these informal and often ignored “trifles” of female community provided the building blocks for female solidarity in the workplace. While most critical approaches to working-class fiction emphasize female suffering rather than agency, this book argues that working women themselves viewed aspects of consumer culture and new avenues for courtship as extensions of their rights as breadwinners. The strike itself is an intense moment of political upheaval that lends itself to more extensive personal and sexual freedoms. Through its analysis of strike novels, this book provides a fuller picture of working-class women as they simultaneously navigate new identities as “working ladies” and enter the dramatic and sometimes violent world of labor activism. This book is recommended for scholars of literary studies, women’s studies, and US history.

The study of continuities and discon-tinuties in American working-class life represents a central concern in the literature on stratification and equality. This book, based on a 1975 Ford Foundation conference and updated to take into account the most recent developments, offers a sobering appraisal of the American working class, revealing the continuing gap between organized and unorganized workers despite the huge increase in the work force; the emergence of subclass structures between factory workers at one end and workers engaged in marginal occupations at the other; and the durability of pluralistic, multiclass politics within this large and amorphous working class. The volume is unique for several reasons: it focuses directly on the role of women in the labor force, ethnic and racial divisions within the working class, and the place of organized labor in international affairs. The American Working CJass Today offers a penetrating and wide-ranging examination by leading social and political researchers of a range of problems -- from how data are collected and manipulated to what the future holds for American workers. Contents and Contributors: THE THEORY OF AN AMERICAN WORKING CLASS John H.M. Laslett, S.M. Miller, Martha Bush, Irving Louis Horowitz CLEAVAGES AND CHANGES WITHIN THE WORKING CLASS Edna Bonacich, Gabriel Kolko, Edna E. Raphael. Robert Bibb, Martin Oppenheimer, Frank Riessman, John C. Leggett THE WORKING CLASS IN AN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT Henry Berger. William H. Form, Helen Icken Safa, Elizabeth Jelin

A History of American Working-Class Literature sheds light not only on the lived experience of class but the enormously varied creativity of working-class people throughout the history of what is now the United States. By charting a chronology of working-class experience, as the conditions of work have changed over time, this volume shows how the practice of organizing, economic competition, place, and time shape opportunity and desire. The subjects range from transportation narratives and slave songs to the literature of deindustrialization and globalization. Among the literary forms discussed are memoir, journalism, film, drama, poetry, speeches, fiction, and song. Essays focus on plantation, prison, factory, and farm, as well as on labor unions, workers' theaters, and innovative publishing ventures. Chapters spotlight the intersections of class with race, gender, and place. The variety, depth, and many provocations of this History are certain to enrich the study and teaching of American literature.

This book is one of the first collections on a neglected field in American literature: that written by and about the working-class. Examining literature from the 1850s to the present, contributors use a wide variety of critical approaches, expanding readers’ understanding of the critical lenses that can be applied to working-class literature. Drawing upon theories of media studies, postcolonial studies, cultural geography, and masculinity studies, the essays consider slave narratives, contemporary poetry and fiction, Depression-era newspaper plays, and ethnic American literature. Depicting the ways that working-class writers render the lives, the volume explores the question of what difference class makes, and how it intersects with gender, race, ethnicity, and geographical location.

Volume 5 "THE WORKING CLASS AND ITS CULTURE’ of the American Cities; series. This collection brings together more than 200 scholarly articles pertaining to the history and development of urban life in the United States during the past two centuries. Volume 5 contains articles that are closely related but which concentrate specifically on the changing nature of work in American cities during the past two centuries. While they obviously concern the development of the industrial and post-industrial economies, they also recognize that economic transformations are intimately related to cultural change and that economic and cultural change are inseparable and must be considered together. At the same time, taken as a group, the articles reveal differences in experience between black and white Americans, men and women, and native and foreign-born Americans, necessitating that each of these groups be considered separately. The selections also investigate and illuminate questions about the relationships among these different groups and the kinds of actions they have taken to achieve their goals—political protests, boycotts, strikes, and so on.

Working-Class America represents the new labor history par excellence. Its ten original essays, by some of the best young scholars in the field, are at the frontier of current research and demonstrate the ability of working-class historians to produce exciting new insights into the nature of American society. Working-Class America, however, offers more than scholarly historical-sociological analyses. In these pages, the lives of real men and women emerge from behind the veil of statistical abstraction. It is precisely that human dimension which makes this collection so valuable as a digest for scholars and yet so accessible as a text for students.

The use of objects as source materials for scholarship has been increasingly legitimized by the growth of American Studies programs which are now in the forefront in their work with objects. The use of the museum as a primary resource is currently being given a position of increasing importance in American Studies scholarship.