Daughters of the Great Depression: women, work, and fiction in the American 1930s

Abstract

Daughters of the Great Depression is a reinterpretation of more than 50 well-known and rediscovered works of Depression-era fiction that illuminate one of the decade's central conflicts: whether to include 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 don't 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; Labour Department Women's Bureau statistics; true romance stories and fallen women films; studies of African-American women's wage earning; and Fortune magazine pronouncements on white-collar womanhood. A valuable revisionist study, Daughters of the Great Depression shows how fiction's 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 labour climate of the 1930s.