Research Catalog

Title

Daughters of the Great Depression : women, work, and fiction in the American 1930s / Laura Hapke.

Author

Hapke, Laura.

Publication

Athens : University of Georgia Press, [1995], ©1995.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xxi, 286 pages : illustrations; 26 cm

Summary

• Working women, from industrial wage earners to business professionals, were the literary and cultural scapegoats of the 1930s, argues Laura Hapke. In Daughters of the Great Depression she reinterprets more than fifty well-known and rediscovered works of Depression Era fiction to illuminate one of the decade's central conflicts: whether to include women in the hard-pressed workforce or relegate them to a literal or figurative home sphere.
• To locate these key texts in the "don't steal a job from a man" furor of the time, she draws on a wealth of 1930s sources not usually considered by literary scholars. These sources include articles on gender and the job controversy; Labor Department Women's Bureau statistics; "true romance" stories and "fallen woman" films; studies of African-American women's wage earning; and Fortune magazine pronouncements on white-collar womanhood.

Subjects

• American fiction > 20th century > History and criticism
• Women > Employment > United States > Historiography
• Women employees in literature
• Women and literature > United States > History > 20th century
• Depressions in literature
• Work in literature
• American fiction > Women authors > History and criticism

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

1. Old Whine, New Battles: Men's Needs, Women's Jobs -- 2. Earth Mothers, Streetwalkers, and Masculine Social Protest Fiction -- 3. Feminine Social Protest Fiction and the Mother-Burden -- 4. Love's Wages: Women, Work, Fiction, and Romance -- 5. The Rising of the Mill Women: Gastonia and Its Literature -- 6. With Apologies for Competence: Women, Profession, Tales of Conflict -- Conclusion: Depression Fictions.

ISBN

0820317187 (alk. paper)

LCCN

94040316

OCLC

• 31328488
• ocm31328488

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries