Women at Work presents the field of rhetorical studies with fifteen chapters that center on gender, rhetoric, and work in the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Feminist scholars explore women’s labor evangelism in the textile industry, the rhetorical constructions of leadership within women’s trade unions, the rhetorical branding of a twentieth-century female athlete, the labor activism of an African American blues singer, and the romantic, same-sex collaborations that supported pedagogical labor. Women at Work also introduces readers to rhetorical methods and approaches possible for the study of gender and work. Contributors name and explore a specific rhetorical concern that animates their study and in so doing, readers learn about such concepts as professional proof, rhetorical failure, epideictic embodiment, rhetorics of care, and cross-racial coalition building.
Table of Contents
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- Introduction: Working Women in(to) Rhetorical History —Jessica Enoch and David Gold
- Republicanism, Religiosity, and the Rhetoric of Women’s Labor Reform in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1830-50 —Amy J. Wan
- From Slave to Seamstress: Elizabeth Keckley’s Rhetoric of Emotional Labor —Patty Wilde
- Louisa May Alcott’s Work: A New True Working Woman —Nancy Myers
- “Opulent Friendships,” Rhetorical Emulation, and Belletristic Instruction at Leache-Wood Seminary —Pamela VanHaitsma
- Resituating Rhetorical Failure: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Metallurgist Carrie Everson —Sarah Hallenbeck
- Professional Proof: Arguing for Women Photographers at the Fin-de-Siècle —Kristie S. Fleckenstein
- Making Use of the Mundane: The Women’s Trade Union League’s Fight to Give Working Women a Voice —Marybeth Poder
- Figuring Vice: Sex, Women, and Work in Kate Waller Barrett’s Exhibitionist Rhetoric —Heather Brook Adams and Jason Barrett-Fox
- Bodies of Praise: Epideictic Figures in the Independent Woman —Risa Applegarth
- To Labor with Dignity: Alberta Hunter’s Respectability and Resistance Rhetoric —Coretta Pittman
- Profiting from Rhetorical Domesticity: Fashion Magnate Nell Donnelly Reed’s Discursive Seams, 1916-56 —Jane Greer
- Babe Didrikson Zaharias’s Rhetorical Branding: When It’s Not Enough to Be the World’s Greatest Woman Athlete —Lisa Shaver
- In Rosie’s Shadow: WWII Recruitment Rhetoric and Women’s Work in Public Memory —Michelle Smith
- “Other Peoples’ Kitchens”: Invisible Labor and Militant Voice during the Early Cold War —Jennifer Keohane
- Gossard Girls Are Good Girls: Labor Activism at a 1949 Garment Factory Strike —Carly S. Woods and Kristen Lucas