Tales of the working girl

Record numbers of women began entering the American labor force in the late 1800s, their experiences composed largely of the drudgery of the factory or the monotony of the sales floor. This feminine mass entry into the workplace sparked thirty-five years of debate, with proponents protesting employers' "moral corruption" of women and detractors arguing for a return to woman's "proper" sphere, the home - evidence of the late-Victorian desire to regulate female sexuality. Authors of fiction were quick to respond: Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, Anzia Yezierska - these and others portrayed working girls in forms as diverse as tenement tales, labor romances, and novels of upward mobility. By joining the period debate about the working girl, her literary imaginers helped shape it. While modern treatments of labor fiction, including those by feminist scholars, have largely ignored these portrayals, Tales of the. Working' Girl does not. Reevaluating both well-known and forgotten texts, this new study by Laura Hapke examines the myriad ways in which the working girl was envisioned by considering the artistic goals and strategies of those who depicted her. Hapke explores to what extent writers acknowledged women's own responses to the controversy, scrutinizes differences in male and female authors' portrayals, and traces the evolution of the working girl as fictional heroine from. The slum melodramas of the 1890s to the strike fiction of the 1910s to the economic ascension novels of the 1920s. Marked by lucid prose and graced by historical photographs and illustrations, Tales of the Working Girl is an important contribution to women's studies, American studies, and labor history.