Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s

Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s by Hapke, Laura. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780820319087.

Daughters of the Great Depression is a reinterpretation of more than fifty well-known and rediscovered works of Depression-era fiction that illuminate one of the decades central conflicts: whether to include women in the hard-pressed workforce or relegate them to a literal or figurative home sphere. Laura Hapke argues that working women, from industrial wage earners to business professionals, were the literary and cultural scapegoats of the 1930s. In locating these key texts in the "dont steal a job from a man" furor of the time, she draws on a wealth of material not usually considered by literary scholars, including articles on gender and the job controversy; Labor Department Womens Bureau statistics; "true romance" stories and "fallen woman" films; studies of African American womens wage earning; and Fortune magazine pronouncements on white-collar womanhood. A valuable revisionist study, Daughters of the Great Depression shows how fictions working heroines―so often cast as earth mothers, flawed mothers, lesser comrades, harlots, martyrs, love slaves, and manly or apologetic professionals―joined their real-life counterparts to negotiate the misogynistic labor climate of the 1930s.