Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age by Smith, Michelle C.

Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780809338351)

Vendor: Michelle C. Smith
Product type: Books
Format: Paperback
$40.00
$40.00
$40.00
Subtotal: $40.00
Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age by Smith, Michelle C.

Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age

$40.00
Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age by Smith, Michelle C.

Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age

$40.00
Format: Paperback
Description
Description
x
2022 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award, Honorable Mention!

A necessary rhetorical history of women's work in utopian communities

Utopian Genderscapes focuses on three prominent yet understudied intentional communities--Brook Farm, Harmony Society, and the Oneida Community--who in response to industrialization experimented with radical social reform in the antebellum United States. Foremost among the avenues of reform was the place and substance of women's work. Author Michelle C. Smith seeks in the communities' rhetorics of teleology, choice, and exceptionalism the lived consequences of the communities' lofty goals for women members.

This feminist history captures the utopian reconfiguration of women's bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses and delivers a needed intervention into how rhetorical gendering interacts with other race and class identities. The attention to each community's material practices reveals a gendered ecology, which in many ways squared unevenly with utopian claims. Nevertheless, this volume argues that this utopian moment inaugurated many of the norms and practices of labor that continue to structure women's lives and opportunities today: the rise of the factory, the shift of labor from home spaces to workplaces, the invention of housework, the role of birth control and childcare, the question of wages, and the feminization of particular kinds of labor.

An impressive and diverse array of archival and material research grounds each chapter's examination of women's professional, domestic, or reproductive labor in a particular community. Fleeting though they may seem, the practices and lives of those intentional women, Smith argues, pattern contemporary divisions of work along the vibrant and contentious lines of gender, race, and class and stage the continued search for what is possible.


Author: Michelle C. Smith
ISBN-10: 0809338351
ISBN-13: 9780809338351
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Language: English
Published: 10/04/2021
Pages: 234
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.60d
By Michelle C. Smith
By Michelle C. Smith
x
Michelle C. Smith is an assistant professor of English at Clemson University. Her teaching and research interests include feminist rhetorics, rhetorical theory, and historiography. Her writing has appeared in College English, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Peitho, as well as in other journals and edited collections.

Recently Viewed Products