Calling Home : Working-Class Women's Writings

Janet Zandy

ISBN 10: 0813515289 / ISBN 13: 9780813515281

Published by Univ Of Chicago Behalf Of Rutgers Univ Press Apr 1990, 1990

Neuware - Working-class women are the majority of women in the United States, and yet their work and their culture are rarely visible.Calling Homeis 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 Homeis illustrated with family photographs as well as images of working women by professional photographers. Seller Inventory # 9780813515281

Synopsis:

"Meridel Le Sueur, Barbara Smith, Nellie Wong, Judy Grahn, and Sharon Doubiago are among the writers who range through speeches, songs, poetry, essays, and fiction in this moving anthology." --Ms. Magazine "Powerful in their dailiness, and full of memory, frustration, endurance, and occasionally a softer emotion, these affecting selections deserve a wide audience." --Feminist Bookstore News "The range of voices raised and experiences represented throughout the book is expansive and liberating, as is the inclusion of any number of unforgettable works by lesser-known writers." --VLS "Ambitious, eclectic, historically wide-ranging. . . . The multicultural (primarily American) contents range from pieces by Agnes Smedley and Mother Jones to contemporary activist storytellers such as Marge Piercy. . . . The authors . . . write proudly and gratefully about the benefits of working-class life . . . a brave anthology, a very welcome addition to the workbench, the kitchen table, and the bookcase." --Women's Review of Books "Rich . . . archival and popular." --Belles Lettres "Their voices . . . form a chorus that speaks for the majority of women in the United States. They are writers whose theme is the working-class woman, and the ethnic, racial and geographic diversity of the working-class experience." --San Francisco Examiner "Zandy's anthology . . . helps us better understand who 'we' are and how many of us have been missing from the stories our culture teaches and learns." --The Literary Review "A powerful and uncompromising collection of essays, stories, poems, and oral histories, and more, reflecting the history and personal experiences of working-class women in America." --Booklist "What diversity! . . . The works reveal a complexity of working-class experience intricately linked like pieces in a giant jigsaw puzzle." --New Directions for Women Janet Zandy is a professor of language and literature at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She has published widely on women's issues.

From the Back Cover: 'A powerful and uncompromising collection of essays, stories, poems, and oral histories, and more, reflecting the history and personal experiences of workingclass women in America.'--Booklist

Bibliographic Details

Title: Calling Home : Working-Class Women's Writings
Publisher: Univ Of Chicago Behalf Of Rutgers Univ Press Apr 1990
Publication Date: 1990
Binding: Taschenbuch
Condition: Neu