Description
Book SynopsisFocuses on literary authors, social reformers, journalists, and anthropologists. This work demonstrates how women intellectuals in early 20th century America combined and criticized ideas from both the Victorian cult of domesticity" and the modern "culture of professionalism" to shape new kinds of writing and new kinds of work for themselves.
Trade Review"This stimulating study focuses on ways in which women who understood themselves as 'professionals' in the years between the final decades of the nineteenth century and the 1940s used the values of their feminine 'past'-sometimes identified as 'the cult of domesticity'-to highlight and criticize contradictions in modern professionalism." *
Choice *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. We Other Victorians: Domesticity and Modern Professionalism
Chapter 1. Domesticity, Cultivation, and Vocation in Jane Addams and Sarah Orne Jewett
Chapter 2. Situated Expertise: Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Pauline Hopkins, and the NACW
Chapter 3. Naturalist Sentimentalism and Cultural Authority in Frank Norris and George Santayana
Chapter 4. "Going Over to the Standard": The Paradoxes of Objectivity in Ida Tarbell and Willa Cather
Chapter 5. Objective Domestic Critique: Anthropology and Social Reform in Ruth Benedict and Zora Neale Hurston
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
