Journal Article

Gender Trouble in The Long Day

Strong, Melissa J

2015

Overview

The American author is a turn-of-the-century prototype for Barbara Ehrenreich: The Long Day exposes the poor working conditions of so-called unskilled jobs and the near impossibility of surviving on their wages in much the same manner that Ehrenreich's New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001) later would. Working-class fiction is difficult to define given the amorphous yet fundamentally binary construction of class, but it is a broad genre that has generated a wealth of scholarship.1 Yezierska's fiction, for instance, has received renewed attention from feminists, labor historians, and scholars of ethnic American literature since the 1970s (Hefner 188). More than a century after it chronicled a nameless woman's attempts to make a living as a housekeeper, a box maker, a manufacturer of artificial flowers, and a laundry worker, The Long Day lends insight and nuance into feminist analyses of early twentieth-century modernity and the New Woman in America, to include a clear picture of privileged women's perceptions of female workers.

• Publisher: Americana: The Institute for the Study of American Popular Culture
• Subject: 20th century / Alcott, Louisa May (1832-1888) / American literature / Cleaning industry / Female employees / Feminism / Fiction / Gender / Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1860-1935) / Historians / Jackson, Helen Hunt (1830-1885) / Jewish literature / Laundry / Middle class / Modernism / Modernity / Occupations / Oppression / Prototypes / Russian literature / Sinclair, Upton Beall (1878-1968) / Wealth / Women / Workers / Working class / Working conditions / Working women / Writers / Yezierska, Anzia (1880-1970)