Dirty Work: Domestic Service in Progressive-Era Women’s Fiction

Description

Dirty Work sheds light on the complex relationships between women employers and their household help in the early twentieth century through their representations in literature, including women’s magazines, conduct manuals, and particularly female-authored fiction. Domestic service brought together women from different classes, races, and ethnicities, and with it, a degree of social anxiety as upwardly mobile young women struggled to construct their identities in a changing world. The book focuses on the works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Anzia Yezierska, and Fannie Hurst and their various depictions of the maid/mistress relationship, revealing “a feminized and racialized brand of class hegemony.”  Modern servants became configured as racial, hygienic, and social threats to the emergent ideal of the nuclear family, and played critical rhetorical roles in first-wave feminism and the New Negro movements. Ann Mattis reveals how U.S. domestic service was the political unconscious of cultural narratives that attempted to define modern domesticity and progressive femininity in monolithic terms. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: American Progressivism's Dirty Work One. Managing the Servant Girl Problem in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Progressive Home Two. The Traffic of Immigrant Domestics in Gertrude Stein's Three Lives Three. A Gothic Romance: Mistresses and Servants in Edith Wharton's Ghost Stories Four. New Black Women and Servitude in Jessie Fauset's The Sleeper Wakes and Nella Larsen's Passing Five. The Oedipalization of Life in Fannie Hurst's Servant Melodramas Afterword: "They Give Me Just What They Think I Am Worth": The Last Word on Servants Notes Works Cited Index