Lynn M. Alexander
Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1999), 29-38

This essay turns to mid-century Victorian England to reconsider the ways in which women, and women seamstresses especially, were routinely selected by women and men writers alike to represent the working classes and to illustrate the hardships and possible social repercussions of industrialism. Women and children were preferred as workers in factories and mills for a number of reasons, but because the seamstress was associated with domesticity, she presented a far more appealing image to middle- and upper-class readers, who were inclined at this time to associate factory workers with violent uprising and immoral abandonment of the home. Writers like Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Elisabeth Stone, Frances Trollope, and Mary Gaskell could deploy the figure of the seamstress to urge their readers to intervene on workers’ behalf. Paradoxically, it was the seamstress’s seeming lack of power that made her powerful as a symbol.

Joanne S. Frye
Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1999), 11-28

Building on the work and insights particularly of Patricia Hill Collins and Sara Ruddick, this essay focuses on questions of childrearing raised by Tillie Olsen’s 1956 short story, “O Yes,” in order to tackle the difficult challenge of antiracist mothering in the 1990s. Undaunted by the inherent conflicts involved in resisting white culture’s racial privileges from within, this essay wrestles with the problem of placing one’s children at the fulcrum of social change: between the urgencies of their own self-confidence, underpinned by privileges accorded by covert racism, and the opposing urgencies of parental and internal pressure to resist racial privilege. How does a mother teach a child to act on Ruddick’s “demands of conscience,” even as the child’s own comfort in the world will have to suffer? Through analysis of Olsen’s story, this article suggests some important alternative practices for a motherhood resistant to racism.

Suvir Kaul
Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2000), 121-136

This essay introduces readers to the writing of Anjana Appachana, a contemporary Indian woman author. Working within a feminist context made available by the growth of urban, middle-class feminism in India since the 1970s, Appachana is one of a group of recent writers who, in contrast to writers like Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, and Arundhati Roy, give voice to a quieter strain in contemporary Indian writing in English, one whose compressed energy derives not from its sweep or its claim to represent entire worlds-in-the-making but from its insistence on enacting in a realist idiom the lives and experiences of middle-class families, particularly those of the women who live within and are defined by the expectations of these families. At the same time, a single story like “Incantations” (1991) simultaneously traces multiple and overlapping stories, becoming thick with event and meditation. “Incantations” is, further, a story whose multilingualism allows an overlap and jostle of languages from which emerge conflicted models of desire and of aberrant or idealized subjectivity.

JoAnn Pavletich
Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2000), 81-104

This article exams the writings of Anzia Yezierska, a Jewish immigrant in 1920s America, and focuses on a moment in the history of affect. Yezierska’s writings engage the tensions in early twentieth-century United States culture between a valorized emotional reserve and a denigrated emotional expressivity through the figure of the emotionally intense Jewish female immigrant, and thereby establishes the immigrant woman as an especially important figure in United States culture precisely because of her effusive emotions. This essay finds that while Yezierska’s texts proffer a critique of class and gender relations in America, her writing remains at least partially constrained not only by cultural stereotypes of affect but also by the early twentieth-century utopian doctrine of sympathy as the answer to oppressive and marginalizing political and economic forces.

Patricia Murphy
Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2000), 57-79

This essay examines Rhoda Broughton’s Dear Faustina (1897), exploring this anti-New Woman novelist’s demonization of her feminist character, Faustina. Though she was widely read in her own day, Broughton has not received much critical attention, yet Dear Faustina provides a fascinating glimpse of the discourses marshalled in the century’s final decades to decry feminist social agenda; it incorporates the vituperative sentiments that entered cultural discourse through both fictional and nonfictional writings and resonates with the nascent scientific study of female homoeroticism conducted by such Victorian sexologists as Havelock Ellis. The essay argues that while this novel rejects the New Woman’s gender relations, her social projects are normalized by being relocated to a male-dominated environment.  Even after Faustina’s defeat, Broughton retains a commitment to a social mission for women despite the novel’s return to patriarchal norms.