Women and children of the mills: An annotated guide to nineteenth-century American textile factory literature.
Item
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Title
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Women and children of the mills: An annotated guide to nineteenth-century American textile factory literature.
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Identifier
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AAI9924840
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identifier
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9924840
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Creator
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Ranta, Judith Alice.
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Contributor
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Adviser: David S. Reynolds
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Date
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1999
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Women's Studies | American Studies
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Abstract
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Fundamentally a literary and historical recovery project, this dissertation collects and synopsizes 457 little-known texts by and about American textile factory workers published from 1787 to 1900. The synopses offer the fullest representation yet available of nineteenth-century mill workers' lives. The first major employer of women and children, the textile industry was also the first-mechanized and the largest nineteenth-century industry, producing as well a rich literary outpouring. The annotated texts include novels, short fiction, poetry, drama, narratives, and children's literature. Texts are drawn from workers' periodicals, newspapers, mainstream publishers' monographs and magazines, story papers, dime novels, pulp publications, and Sunday school tracts. Since mill workers wrote some thirty-six percent of the texts and women authored nearly half, the bibliography offers representations of neglected working-class and female subjectivity.;The critical introduction considers the dissertation's roots in feminist recovery work; in studies of popular and working-class literature by such scholars as Martha Vicinus, Paul Lauter, David S. Reynolds, and Jane Tompkins (especially her concept of the "cultural work" of nineteenth-century popular and women's fiction); and in materialist-feminist criticism. Chapter discussions address the material and social conditions shaping the creation and reception of factory literature. The conventions of factory writing are identified, along with particularly important features and texts.;Primary material is arranged in fourteen chapters according to the writings' cultural work. The literature addresses many women's issues, including changing women's roles, women's work, sexual self-governance, sexual harassment, unwanted pregnancy, same-sex love, heterosexual love and marriage, motherhood, abortion, and rape and other violence against women. Writers tackle such social problems as workers' oppression, class bias, poverty, and child labor. The meaning of the machine and industrialization are also major concerns. Struggles between labor and capital are explored by both labor sympathizers and conservatives. Synopses include ample quotations, thus providing samples of this inaccessible literature. The conclusion connects the primary writings to other kinds of popular writing, including Sunday school literature and Indian captivity and slave narratives. Although industrialism was ignored for the most part by canonical writers, factory literature's influences upon the work of Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, and Dreiser are briefly discussed.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
