Download or read book For the Family written by Sarah Damaske and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-03 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the contentious debate about women and work, conventional wisdom holds that middle-class women can decide if they work, while working-class women need to work. Yet, even after the recent economic crisis, middle-class women are more likely to work than working-class women. Sarah Damaske deflates the myth that financial needs dictate if women work, revealing that financial resources make it easier for women to remain at work and not easier to leave it. Departing from mainstream research, Damaske finds three main employment patterns: steady, pulled back, and interrupted. She discovers that middle-class women are more likely to remain steadily at work and working-class women more likely to experience multiple bouts of unemployment. She argues that the public debate is wrongly centered on need because women respond to pressure to be selfless mothers and emphasize family need as the reason for their work choices. Whether the decision is to stay home or go to work, women from all classes say work decisions are made for their families. In For the Family?, Sarah Damaske at last provides a far more nuanced and richer picture of women, work, and class than the one commonly drawn.
Download or read book Memoirs of Victorian Working Class Women written by Florence s. Boos and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first to identify a significant body of life narratives by working-class women and to demonstrate their inherent literary significance. Placing each memoir within its generic, historical, and biographical context, this book traces the shifts in such writings over time, examines the circumstances which enabled working-class women authors to publish their life stories, and places these memoirs within a wider autobiographical tradition. Additionally, Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women enables readers to appreciate the clear-sightedness, directness, and poignancy of these works.
Download or read book Working class Women in the Academy written by Michelle M. Tokarczyk and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My mother still wants me to get a 'real' job. My father, who is retired after 44 years in the merchant marine, has never read my work. When I visited recently, the only book in his house was the telephone book.
Download or read book Without a Net written by Michelle Tea and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An urgent testament to the trials of life for women living without a financial safety net Indie icon Michelle Tea -- whose memoir The Chelsea Whistle details her own working-class roots in gritty Chelsea, Massachusetts -- shares these fierce, honest, tender essays written by women who can't go home to the suburbs when ends don't meet. When jobs are scarce and the money has dwindled, these writers have nowhere to go but below the poverty line. The writers offer their different stories not for sympathy or sadness, but an unvarnished portrait of how it was, is, and will be for generations of women growing up working class in America. These wide-ranging essays cover everything from selling blood for grocery money to the culture shock of "jumping" class. Contributors include Dorothy Allison, Bee Lavender, Eileen Myles, and Daisy Hernáez.
Download or read book White Working Class written by Joan C. Williams and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I recommend a book by Professor Williams, it is really worth a read, it's called White Working Class." -- Vice President Joe Biden on Pod Save America An Amazon Best Business and Leadership book of 2017 Around the world, populist movements are gaining traction among the white working class. Meanwhile, members of the professional elite—journalists, managers, and establishment politicians--are on the outside looking in, left to argue over the reasons. In White Working Class, Joan C. Williams, described as having "something approaching rock star status" by the New York Times, explains why so much of the elite's analysis of the white working class is misguided, rooted in class cluelessness. Williams explains that many people have conflated "working class" with "poor"--but the working class is, in fact, the elusive, purportedly disappearing middle class. They often resent the poor and the professionals alike. But they don't resent the truly rich, nor are they particularly bothered by income inequality. Their dream is not to join the upper middle class, with its different culture, but to stay true to their own values in their own communities--just with more money. While white working-class motivations are often dismissed as racist or xenophobic, Williams shows that they have their own class consciousness. White Working Class is a blunt, bracing narrative that sketches a nuanced portrait of millions of people who have proven to be a potent political force. For anyone stunned by the rise of populist, nationalist movements, wondering why so many would seemingly vote against their own economic interests, or simply feeling like a stranger in their own country, White Working Class will be a convincing primer on how to connect with a crucial set of workers--and voters.
Download or read book Class Matters written by Pat Mahony and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2005-08-19 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text focuses on the theory of class as it relates to women. It debates questions such as: how do women define themselves in terms of social class and why?; is definition important or not?; what part does education play in our understanding of class?; and how does class affect relationships?
Download or read book Urban Survival written by Ruth Sidel and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although conditions have vastly improved since the days of sweatshops, the working woman is still likely to be underpaid, overworked, and without adequate resources. In Urban Survival eight working-class women of different ages and races speak with pride and independence about their daily reality, their hopes and fears. Ruth Sidel’s new introduction shows that although she interviewed the women in the late seventies, their concerns are still current. Now, as then, the working woman worries about obtaining needed childcare, healthcare, and social services; about being the last hired and first fired; about welfare, drugs, and violence. The oral histories in Urban Survival reveal a vivid picture of the struggle for survival in today’s cities.
Download or read book Formations of Class Gender written by Beverley Skeggs and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1997-06-03 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explanations of how identities are constructed are fundamental to contemporary debates in feminism and in cultural and social theory. Formations of Class & Gender demonstrates why class should be featured more prominently in theoretical accounts of gender, identity and power. Beverley Skeggs identifies the neglect of class, and shows how class and gender must be fused together to produce an accurate representation of power relations in modern society. The book questions how theoretical frameworks are generated for understanding how women live and produce themselves through social and cultural relations. It uses detailed ethnographic research to explain how ′real′ women inhabit and occupy the social and cultural positions of class, femininity and sexuality. As a critical examination of cultural representation - informed by recent feminist theory and the work of Pierre Bourdieu - the book is an articulate demonstration of how to translate theory into practice.
Download or read book Women without Class written by Julie Bettie and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2014-09-18 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ethnographic examination of Mexican-American and white girls coming of age in California’s Central Valley, Julie Bettie turns class theory on its head, asking what cultural gestures are involved in the performance of class, and how class subjectivity is constructed in relationship to color, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. A new introduction contextualizes the book for the contemporary moment and situates it within current directions in cultural theory. Investigating the cultural politics of how inequalities are both reproduced and challenged, Bettie examines the discursive formations that provide a context for the complex identity performances of contemporary girls. The book’s title refers at once to young working-class women who have little cultural capital to enable class mobility; to the fact that analyses of class too often remain insufficiently transformed by feminist, ethnic, and queer studies; and to the failure of some feminist theory itself to theorize women as class subjects. Women without Class makes a case for analytical and political attention to class, but not at the expense of attention to other social formations.
Download or read book Calling Home written by Janet Zandy and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working-class women are the majority of women in the United States, and yet their work and their culture are rarely visible. Calling Home is an anthology of writings by and about working-class women. Over fifty selections represent the ethnic, racial, and geographic diversity of working-class experience. This is writing grounded in social history, not in the academy. Traditional boundaries of genre and periodization collapse in this collection, which includes reportage, oral histories, speeches, songs, and letters, as well as poetry, stories, and essays. The divisions in this collection - telling stories, bearing witness, celebrating solidarity - address the distinction of "by" or "about" working-class women, and show the connections between individual identity and collective sensibility in a common history of struggle for economic justice. The geography of home, identity, parents, sex, motherhood, the dominance of the job, the overlapping of private and public worlds, the promise of solidarity and community are a few of the themes of this book. Here is a chorus of working class women's voices: Sandra Cisneros, Barbara Garson, Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, Barbara Smith, Endesha I. M. Holland, Mother Jones, Nellie Wong, Agnes Smedley, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Sharon Doubiago, Carol Tarlen, Hazel Hall, Margaret Randall, Judy Grahn, and many others! The aesthetic impulse is shaped by class, but not limited to one ruling class. What connects these writers is a collective consciousness, a class, which rejects bondage and lays claim to liberation through all the possibilities of language. Calling Home is illustrated with family photographs as well as images of working women by professional photographers.
Download or read book CITY OF WOMEN written by Christine Stansell and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-12-19 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brilliant and vivid study of life in New York City during the years between the creation of the republic and the Civil War, a distinguished historian explores the position of men and women in both the poor and middle classes, the conflict between women of the laboring poor and those of the genteel classes who tried to help them and the ways in which laboring women traced out unforeseen possibilities for themselves in work and in politics. Christine Stansell shows how a new concept of womanhood took shape in America as middle-class women constituted themselves the moral guardians of their families and of the nation, while poor workingwomen, cut adrift from the family ties that both sustained and oppressed them, were subverting—through their sudden entry into the working and political worlds outside the home—the strict notions of female domesticity and propriety, of “woman’s place” and “woman’s nature,” that were central to the flowering and the image of bourgeois life in America. Here we have a passionate and enlightening portrait of New York during the years in which it was becoming a center of world capitalist development, years in which it was evolving in dramatic ways, becoming the city it fundamentally is. And we have, as well, a radically illuminating depiction of a class conflict in which the dialectic of female vice and virtue was a central issue. City of Women is a prime work of scholarship, the first full-scale work by a major new voice in the fields of American and urban history.
Download or read book Working Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain written by Florence S. Boos and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2008-06-12 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though working-class women in the nineteenth century included many accomplished and prolific poets, their work has often been neglected by critics and readers in favour of comparable work by men. Questioning the assumption that few poems by working-class women had survived, Florence Boos set out to discover supposedly lost works in libraries, private collections, and archives. Her years of research resulted in this anthology. Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain features poetry from a variety of women, including an itinerant weaver, a rural midwife, a factory worker protesting industrialization, and a blind Scottish poet who wrote in both the Scots dialect and English. In addition to biographical information and contemporary reviews of the poets’ work, the anthology also includes several photographs of the poets, their environment, and the journals in which their poems appeared.
Download or read book School smart and Mother wise written by Wendy Luttrell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-04 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: School-smart and Mother-wise illustrates how and why American education disadvantages working-class women when they are children and adults. In it we hear working-class women--black and white, rural and urban, southern and northern--recount their childhood experiences, describing the circumstances that led them to drop out of school. Now enrolled in adult education programs, they seek more than a diploma: respect, recognition, and a public identity. Drawing upon the life stories of these women, Wendy Luttrell sensitively describes and analyzes the politics and psychodynamics that shape working-class life, schooling, and identity. She examines the paradox of women's education, particularly the relationship between schooling and mothering, and offers practical suggestions for school reform.
Download or read book Growing Up Working Class written by Robert Wegs and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of working-class culture, youth behavior, and the response of youths to conditions in a European setting acknowledges that poverty existed among much of the working class but questions the implicit arguments that these conditions necessarily brought about destructive responses. Until recently, various simplistic paradigms have dominated studies of European workers. These have stressed the misery of urban laborers in a capitalistic society, the functional importance of the isolated nuclear family in an industrial society, or the violent, authoritarian, and intolerant nature of working-class society as a result of cultural deprivation. The approach here, in contrast, is allied with the current trend in social history to allow for elements of diversity and individual initiative within the labor population. Numerous oral interviews are used to enrich other data and to provide evidence on family life that is missing in traditional sources. In examining the way life was actually lived, this book deals primarily with the children of manual laborers, but includes the children of other socially disadvantaged groups in the working-class districts. It analyses the social dimensions among laborers and those immediately above them, such as small-scale shopkeepers. With the view that there is not just one working-class culture but many, it explains the diversity of the working-class experience rather than concentrating only on the most impoverished stratum within it. Wegs argues that much of the working class had a fuller and richer life than is depicted in existing literature. The length of the period covered makes it possible also to draw comparisons and identify long-term trends. Separate chapters are devoted to topics such as everyday life, schooling, work, and sex and marriage. By showing how working-class youth were isolated within primarily working-class areas but still tied to the dominant culture through the schools, social workers, and the Social Democratic subculture, the book adds an important dimension to the study of the working class. It provides a fuller dimension to the study of the working-class youth by dealing with young women as well as men, and with major arguments concerning sexual divisions at work, in the family, and in society. It examines the subordinate position of women in working-class culture but also notes their significant role in the family and in society. Wegs&’s study will be of interest to students of European history and social history, particularly those interested in the working class, issues of adolescence, and the family.
Download or read book Gendering Labor History written by Alice Kessler-Harris and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of gender in the history of the working class world
Download or read book A Woman s Place written by and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book From Spinster to Career Woman written by Arlene Young and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-05-30 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late Victorian period brought a radical change in cultural attitudes toward middle-class women and work. Anxiety over the growing disproportion between women and men in the population, combined with an awakening desire among young women for personal and financial freedom, led progressive thinkers to advocate for increased employment opportunities. The major stumbling block was the persistent conviction that middle-class women - "ladies" - could not work without relinquishing their social status. Through media reports, public lectures, and fictional portrayals of working women, From Spinster to Career Woman traces advocates' efforts to alter cultural perceptions of women, work, class, and the ideals of womanhood. Focusing on the archetypal figures of the hospital nurse and the typewriter, Arlene Young analyzes the strategies used to transform a job perceived as menial into a respected profession and to represent office work as progressive employment for educated women. This book goes beyond a standard examination of historical, social, and political realities, delving into the intense human elements of a cultural shift and the hopes and fears of young women seeking independence. Providing new insights into the Victorian period, From Spinster to Career Woman captures the voices of ordinary women caught up in the frustrations and excitements of a new era.
