Women and Work Women and Work: The Labors of Self-Fashioning Edited by Christine Leiren Mower and Susanne Weil Women and Work: The Labors of Self-Fashioning, Edited by Christine Leiren Mower and Susanne Weil This book first published 2011 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2011 by Christine Leiren Mower and Susanne Weil and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-2422-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2422-4 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations ................................................................................... viii Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... ix Chapter One................................................................................................. 1 “Let Us Own Ourselves, Our Earnings, Our Genius”: The Uneasy Marriage of Women and Work Christine Leiren Mower and Susanne Weil Part I: Redefining the Nature of Women’s Work Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 50 Feminine Duty and Desire: Revising the Cultural Narrative in Gissing’s The Odd Women Gretchen Braun Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 74 Woman and Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man: Women, Work, and Evolution in the Works of Olive Schreiner Daniel P. Shea Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 97 Reworking Professionalism: Women Doctors in Creamer and Phelps Kelly Ross Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 120 Nature, Domestic Labor, and Moral Community in Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours and Elinor Wyllys Richard M. Magee Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 140 “Work and Wait”: Louisa May Alcott’s Female Artists Erin Hendel vi Table of Contents Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 163 Mixing Business with Pleasure: The Figure of the “Business Girl” in Sinclair Lewis’s The Job and Winston Churchill’s The Dwelling- Place of Light Polina Kroik Part II: Reading Class Tensions in Constructions of Women’s Work Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 188 “To Work Is To Be Socially Alive”: The Failed Promise of Domestic Service in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s What Diantha Did Kellen H. Graham Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 206 The New (Working) Woman in Gilman’s Herland Melissa J. Strong Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 227 To Dance with “The Hired Girls”: Love, Labor, and Longing in My Antonia Nancy Von Rosk Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 243 They Worked Hard For No Money: Women, Labor, and Working- Class Politics in the Writing of Meridel Le Sueur Amy Brady Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 259 Harvesting Freedom: Women, Work, and Liberation in J. California Cooper’s Family and Octavia Butler’s Kindred Ferentz Lafargue Part III: The Labor of Self-Making Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 274 Women in the Public: Society Women in Edith Wharton’s Fiction Li-Wen Chang Women and Work: The Labors of Self-Fashioning vii Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 302 “Following the Fashion”: Women, Work, and Class Construction in East Lynne Annarose Fitzgerald Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 319 Conduct Becoming a 1930s Heroine: Middle-Class Ideology and the “Strategic Self” Katherine Rogers-Carpenter Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 342 Afterword: The Battle of the Bell(e)s: The Sweet Labor of Working Through It with bell hooks Marie-Antoinette Smith Bibliography............................................................................................ 364 Contributors............................................................................................. 396 Index........................................................................................................ 398 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 15-1: “Here Comes the Hostess.” Image Courtesy of Oneida Ltd. Copyright 1938 Oneida Ltd. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Women and Work grew from a series of special sessions at the 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2009 annual conferences of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA). We thank PAMLA Executive Directors Salah Khan and Craig Svonkin, as well as Beverly Voloshin and Thierry Boucquey, PAMLA’s special session coordinators, for their support. These sessions sparked an outpouring of creative, thoughtful responses to the topic from many excellent panelists—particularly our contributors here, whose labor, care, and collaboration we appreciate deeply. We also thank Amanda Millar, Carol Koulikourdi, Soucin Yip-Sou, and Dr. Andy Nercessian of Cambridge Scholars Publishers for their interest in and encouragement of this volume. For the cover photograph of women working in the Chehalis, Washington Boeing plant during World War II, we gratefully acknowledge the help of Debbie Knapp, Director of the Lewis County Historical Museum of Washington State, Kevin Kelly of Boeing Images, and Edna Fund, “History Sleuth” for the Centralia Chronicle, who first located the image for “Real Life Rosie the Riveters,” a Centralia College Lyceum lecture, March 10, 2010. Susanne thanks the Centralia College Foundation for the 2008 Teaching Excellence Award, funding from which helped her attend “Women and Work” sessions in 2008 and 2009. She is grateful to her late grandmother, Martha Close Greenough, for the inspiration of her stories of life as a working woman, wife, and mother in the years spanning World Wars I and II. Finally, Susanne thanks her husband, Peter Glover, for unflagging love, support, and sandwiches throughout this project. Christine thanks Priscilla Wald for her generous mentorship over the years and for her encouragement of this project. She is grateful to Jodie O'Brien and successive chairs of the Women Studies Program at Seattle University—Maria Fernandez-Bullon and Mary-Antoinette Smith—for their collective faith in her work as a feminist and scholar with each incoming class of students. Lastly, Christine thanks her mother, Dorin Virginia Anderson Schuler, for her well-told tales of work and x Acknowledgements motherhood and for her laughter which, even now, still makes her daughter sing. CHAPTER ONE “L ET US OWN OURSELVES , OUR EARNINGS , OUR GENIUS ”:1 THE UNEASY MARRIAGE OF WOMEN AND WORK CHRISTINE LEIREN MOWER AND SUSANNE WEIL I can remember it clearly, the day my mother imparted her womanly wisdom to me. It was 1979. I was nineteen, a college student. Mom was fifty-five and, while a veteran of a long, complicated marriage, recently widowed. “Christine,” she said to me, “Christine . never, never marry until you finish school . find a career . buy a house.” My mother, deeply steeped in her hard-won middle-class values of education and upward mobility, was imparting a “universal” life lesson to me, or so she thought. While she could not quite utter these words, what she was saying to me was—“don’t marry till you become who you are.” For Mom, a plucky woman who grew up poor during the Depression and began her married life in the 50s amidst the bloom of consumerism and domestic product innovation, love, marriage, children, while obviously dear to her, were nonetheless antithetical to becoming a woman. And becoming a woman, for Mom, clearly meant economic self-sufficiency, not dependence on a marriage partner. The only way to resolve this conundrum was to respect priorities—become yourself before you lose yourself through domesticity. Economic survival and fulfillment first, children and marriage later, much later. My mother’s words continued to speak to me, more than thirty years later, as Susanne and I conceived this anthology in the early months of 2009. While my mother was a pro with language, little survives of her words. As her archivist, my repeated searches through her papers have yielded her pay stubs, her bank books, her sketches for award-winning 2 Chapter One advertisements, her commendations from her boss Victor (my mom was a saver)—but none of these reveal how she saw herself as a woman juggling work, children, personal happiness. And so I have speculated: what led Mom to her unrelenting ideas about marriage and family, economics and self-fulfillment? What was it in her experience as a sales clerk and a fashion advertiser for Frederick & Nelson and then, later, as a young married woman with three children, struggling