Modern Women, Modern Work
Domesticity, Professionalism, and American Writing, 1890-1950
Francesca Sawaya
"Sawaya's treatment of the dynamic relationship between discourses of domesticity and professionalism during the early decades of the twentieth century makes a strong contribution to debates about gender, race, and work."--Alice Gambrell, University of Southern California
"This stimulating study focuses on ways in which women who understood themselves as 'professionals' in the years between the final decades of the nineteenth century and the 1940s used the values of their feminine 'past'--sometimes identified as 'the cult of domesticity'--to highlight and criticize contradictions in modern professionalism."--Choice
Focusing on literary authors, social reformers, journalists, and anthropologists, Francesca Sawaya demonstrates how women intellectuals in early twentieth-century America combined and criticized ideas from both the Victorian "cult of domesticity" and the modern "culture of professionalism" to shape new kinds of writing and new kinds of work for themselves.
Sawaya challenges our long-standing histories of modern professional work by elucidating the multiple ways domestic discourse framed professional culture. Modernist views of professionalism typically told a racialized story of a historical break between the primitive, feminine, and domestic work of the Victorian past and the modern, masculine, professional expertise of the present. Modern Women, Modern Work historicizes this discourse about the primitive labor of women and racial others and demonstrates how it has been adopted uncritically in contemporary accounts of professionalism, modernism, and modernity.
Seeking to recuperate black and white women's contestations of the modern professions, Sawaya pairs selected novels with a broad range of nonfiction writings to show how differing narratives about the transition to modernity authorized women's professionalism in a variety of fields. Among the figures considered are Jane Addams, Ruth Benedict, Willa Cather, Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Sarah Orne Jewett, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Ida Tarbell. In mapping out the constraints women faced in their writings and their work, and in tracing the slippery compromises they embraced and the brilliant adaptations they made, Modern Women, Modern Work boldly reenvisions the history of modern professionalism in the United States.
Francesca J. Sawaya teaches English at the University of Oklahoma.
Rethinking the Americas
2003 | 208 pages | 6 x 9
ISBN 978-0-8122-3743-6 | Cloth | $55.00s | £36.00
ISBN 978-0-8122-0326-4 | Ebook | $55.00s | £36.00
World Rights | Literature, Women's/Gender Studies

Introduction. We Other Victorians: Domesticity and Modern Professionalism
Chapter 1. Domesticity, Cultivation, and Vocation in Jane Addams and Sarah Orne Jewett
Chapter 2. Situated Expertise: Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Pauline Hopkins, and the NACW
Chapter 3. Naturalist Sentimentalism and Cultural Authority in Frank Norris and George Santayana
Chapter 4. "Going Over to the Standard": The Paradoxes of Objectivity in Ida Tarbell and Willa Cather
Chapter 5. Objective Domestic Critique: Anthropology and Social Reform in Ruth Benedict and Zora Neale Hurston
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Francesca J. Sawaya teaches English at the University of Oklahoma.