The Personal and the Political in American Working-Class Literature, 1850–1939

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 women’s culture—fashion, fiction, and dance halls—become 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 Wor