Laboring Women and the Languages of Class in Antebellum America

FAIN: FA-52850-06

Lori A. Merish
Georgetown University (Washington, DC 20057-0001)

The first book-length study of antebellum working-class women's literature, "Laboring Women and the Languages of Class" examines textual representations of a diverse group of working women: Lowell mill women, black women "free laborers" and slaves, Mexicana mission workers, urban seamstresses, and prostitutes. Focusing on working-class women as both writers and readers of periodical literature and popular fiction, the book demonstrates that antebellum popular literature both represents, and constitutes, the complex, often contradictory forms of workingwomen's subjectivity.