What We Hold In Common: Exploring Women's Lives & Working Class Studies

by Janet Zandy (Editor)

Overview

"Let us imagine what it would be like," writes Janet Zandy at the outset of this ground-breaking volume, "if the history and culture of working-class people were at the center of educational practices. What would students learn?" Among other things, she suggests, "they would understand that culture is created by individuals within social contexts and that they themselves could produce it as well as consume it."

Working-class history and literature have too often been ignored in traditional curricula, remain invisible in most texts, and are unavailable to students and teachers. Essential reading for all interested in the rapidly growing field of working-class studies, What We Hold in Common offers a distinct combination of primary voices, critical essays, and resources for curriculum transformation. It deepens the understanding of working-class literature, history, culture, and artistic production, while attending to the material conditions of working-class peoples' lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781558612594
Publisher:	Feminist Press at CUNY, The
Publication date:	04/01/2001
Edition description:	1 ED
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	viii
	Preface to the New Edition	ix
	Introduction	xiii
	Working-Class Voices
	School Clothes	3
	Go See Jack London	7
	Stories from a Working-Class Childhood	10
	"Proud to Work for the University"	12
	Ruth in August	17
	Death Mask	24
	For Giacomo	26
	El olor de cansansio (The Smell of Fatigue)	27
	The Pawnbroker's Window	30
	Praise the Waitresses	32
	Faces in the Hands	34
	Recovering Working-Class Autobiography and Oral History
	'We Did Change Some Attitudes': Maida Springer-Kemp and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union	47
	Autobiography and Reconstructing Subjectivity at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1921-1938	71
	Working Class Consciousness in Jo Sinclair's The Seasons	96
	The Writing on the Wall, Or Where Did That Dead Head Come From?	101
	Autobiographies by American Working-Class Women: A Bibliography	112
	Practicing Working-Class Studies
	Reclaiming Our Working-Class Identities: Teaching Working-Class Studies in a Blue-Collar Community (with syllabi)	123
	A Wealth of Possibilities: Workers, Texts, and the English Department	132
	A Community of Workers (photos and text)	142
	'Women Have Always Sewed': The Production of Clothing and the Work of Women	148
	The Fire Poems	154
	Introduction
	Sisters in the Flames
	Rituals of spring (for the 78th anniversary of the shirtwaist factory fire)
	Working-Class Texts and Theory
	Readerly/Writerly Relations and Social Change: The Maimie Papers as Literature	165
	Between Theories and Anti-Theories: Moving Toward Marginal Women's Subjectivities	182
	'People Who Might Have Been You': Agency and the Damaged Self in Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio	199
	Industrial Music: Contemporary American Working-Class Poetry and Modernism	207
	U.S. Working-Class Women's Fiction: Notes Toward an Overview	223
	New Initiatives, Syllabi, and Resources
	Traveling Working Class	241
	Building a Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University	253
	The Rochester Education Alliance of Labor Work-Based Curriculum Project	258
	Honor Thy Students: The Power of Writing	265
	Mining Class: A Bibliographic Essay	269
	Working, Buying, and Becoming: Race, Labor, and the High Life, from the Plantation to the Internet (syllabus)	275
	Working-Class Studies and the Question of Proletarian Literature in the United States: A Graduate Seminar in American Literature (syllabus)	283
	Women and Work in U.S. History (syllabus)	285
	Poor in America (syllabus)	290
	American Capitalism (syllabus)	294
	Who Does the Work? A One-Day Introduction to American Working-Class Literature (syllabus)	298
	Working-Class Literature and Film (syllabus with student writing)	301
	Labor Documentaries: A Filmography	311
	American Working-Class Literature: A Selected Bibliography	315
	Biographical Notes	327
	Publication Acknowledgments	335

Editorial Reviews

Brings together the voices of working-class people in poetry, fiction, memoir, and song, with strong emphasis on the voices of working-class women. Critical essays place working-class studies in perspective, touching on autobiographies and oral histories, the practice of working-class studies, and current and emerging texts and theories. Course syllabi and curriculum materials offer specific strategies and resources for the classroom. This collection draws on the 1995 volume of , a text that was pivotal in the development of working-class studies. Zandy teaches language and literature at Rochester Institute of Technology. The book is not indexed. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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