As working women invaded the public space of the factory in the nineteenth century, they challenged Victorian notions of female domesticity and chastity. With virtue at the forefront of discussions regarding working women, aspects of working-class womens culturefashion, fiction, and dance hallsbecome vivid signifiers for moral impropriety, and attempts to censure these activities become overt attempts to censure female sexuality in the workplace.The Personal and the Political in American Working-Class Literature, 18501939 argues that these informal and often ignored trifles of female community provided the building blocks for female solidarity in the workplace. While most critical approaches to working-class fiction emphasize female suffering rather than agency, this book argues that working women themselves viewed aspects of consumer culture and new avenues for courtship as extensions of their rights as breadwinners. The strike itself is an intense moment of political upheaval that lends itself to more extensive personal and sexual freedoms. Through its analysis of strike novels, this book provides a fuller picture of working-class women as they simultaneously navigate new identities as working ladies and enter the dramatic and sometimes violent world of labor activism. This book is recommended for scholars of literary studies, womens studies, and US history.

Laurie Cella is associate professor of English at Shippensburg University.

AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1: The Lowell Experiment: Finery, Chastity, and an Emerging Working-class CultureChapter 2: Maud Matchin: A Working-Class American Beauty in John HaysThe Breadwinners (1896)Chapter 3: Strikers at the Ball: Radical Romances of the Great Shirtwaist Strike,Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker (1909) andComrade Yetta (1913)Chapter 4: Romance on the Picket Line: Mary Heaton VorsesStrike! (1930) and Dorothy Myra PagesGathering Storm (1932)Chapter 5: Violence and Female Sexuality in Sherwood Andersons Beyond Desire (1932) and William RollinssThe Shadow Before (1934)Chapter 6: Romance as Redemption in Olive Tilford DargansCall Home the Heart(1932),Stone Came Rolling (1935) and Grace LumpkinsTo Make My Bread (1932)ConclusionWorks Cited