Class, Work, and New Races: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth

Abstract

Meridel Le Sueur’s principal attention in Salute to Spring and in her literary journalism is on the everyday, blended into distinctive attitudes or forms of consciousness. For Le Sueur the experiences of the everyday, particularly those of the American underclass and workers in the 1930s, can offer a form of resistance to dominant political strategies of power. Metaphors of the everyday in Le Sueur’s fiction and literary journalism predominantly involve women—her representative markers and victims of daily existence. Women are symbolic of dulling domestic repetitions, the targets of violence, abuse, neglect—the figures who most strongly convey the life-destroying routines of capitalism. But in Le Sueur, women as laborers (and all are in some form) resist the polarization of the “feminine” repetitive everyday to the “masculine” rupture and revolution—one of Le Sueur’s ways of taking to task “proletarian works” that elide the experience of women workers by demoting their work and refusing to recognize it as “wage labor.” Le Sueur, as we’ve seen, constantly brings to the reader’s mind the relations of work to mobility versus the insufficiency of the middle-class imaginary to interpret such mobility. Paralleling in their texts many of Le Sueur’s concerns, Agnes Smedley and Zora Neale Hurston give work a new representative twist and, in so doing, provide us with exemplary models for articulating the relations of gender to class.KeywordsBirth ControlWoman WriterMining CampFrame NarrativeBlue JeanThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.