Modern Women, Modern Work: Domesticity, Professionalism, and American Writing, 189-195

Francesca Sawaya

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press 2004

Modern Women, Modern Work

Domesticity, Professionalism, and American Writing, 189-195

Francesca Sawaya

In the series Rethinking the Americas

https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812203264

Overview
Contents

About this book

Focusing on literary authors, social reformers, journalists, and anthropologists, Francesca Sawaya demonstrates how women intellectuals in early twentieth-century America combined and criticized ideas from both the Victorian "cult of domesticity" and the modern "culture of professionalism" to shape new kinds of writing and new kinds of work for themselves.

Sawaya challenges our long-standing histories of modern professional work by elucidating the multiple ways domestic discourse framed professional culture. Modernist views of professionalism typically told a racialized story of a historical break between the primitive, feminine, and domestic work of the Victorian past and the modern, masculine, professional expertise of the present. Modern Women, Modern Work historicizes this discourse about the primitive labor of women and racial others and demonstrates how it has been adopted uncritically in contemporary accounts of professionalism, modernism, and modernity.

Seeking to recuperate black and white women's contestations of the modern professions, Sawaya pairs selected novels with a broad range of nonfiction writings to show how differing narratives about the transition to modernity authorized women's professionalism in a variety of fields. Among the figures considered are Jane Addams, Ruth Benedict, Willa Cather, Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Sarah Orne Jewett, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Ida Tarbell. In mapping out the constraints women faced in their writings and their work, and in tracing the slippery compromises they embraced and the brilliant adaptations they made, Modern Women, Modern Work boldly reenvisions the history of modern professionalism in the United States.

Author / Editor information

Francesca J. Sawaya teaches English at the University of Oklahoma.

Reviews

"Sawaya's treatment of the dynamic relationship between discourses of domesticity and professionalism during the early decades of the twentieth century makes a strong contribution to debates about gender, race, and work."—Alice Gambrell, University of Southern California

"This stimulating study focuses on ways in which women who understood themselves as 'professionals' in the years between the final decades of the nineteenth century and the 1940s used the values of their feminine 'past'—sometimes identified as 'the cult of domesticity'—to highlight and criticize contradictions in modern professionalism."—Choice

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Introduction. We Other Victorians Domesticity and Modern Professionalism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter I. Domesticity, Cultivation, and Vocation in Jane Addams and Sarah Orne Jewett Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
Chapter 2 Situated Expertise Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Pauline Hopkins, and the NACW Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	36
Chapter 3. Naturalist Sentimentalism and Cultural Authority in Frank Norris and George Santayana Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	56
Chapter 4. "Going over to the Standard" The Paradoxes of Objectivity in Ida Tarbell and Willa Cather Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	80
Chapter 5. Objective Domestic Critique Anthropology and Social Reform in Ruth Benedict and Zora Neale Hurston Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
Afterword Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	139
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	147
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	193
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 208
Keywords: Literature; Women's Studies; Gender Studies; Cultural Studies; Gender Studies

eBook

Published: April 19, 2013
ISBN: 9780812203264