New book offers insight on women, literary interest

In her recently released book "Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration," Sylvia Cook, professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, explores the entry of working-class women in the United States into wage-earning factory labor and opportunities for mental and literary development. Her book is the first to examine the exchange between the work and literary spheres for laboring women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

"My book explores the role in which the intellectual and creative activities of reading and writing played in the lives of these working-class women," Cook said. "And also in later generations of immigrants who worked in sweatshops in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It examines their interaction with middle-class women authors who were often their gender allies on social questions and sometimes their class patrons on artistic matters."

Cook wrote "Working Women" because of her interest in the fact that early factory women in Massachusetts in 1840 were writing poetry, fiction and essays for their own literary magazine, "Mind amongst the Spindles," after a 12 hour workday at their machines.

Cook goes on to say that these working women did not read and write because it improved their career prospects or increased their income, but because it enhanced their lives and their sense of themselves as more fulfilled human beings.

She also examines the literary productions of the women, ranging from their first New England magazine of belles lettres, "The Lowell Offering," to Emma Goldman's periodical, "Mother Earth," from Lucy Larcom's epic poem of female factory life, "An Idyl of Work," to Theresa Malkiel's fictional account of sweatshop workers in New York, "The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker."

Amy Schrager Lang, professor of humanities and English at Syracuse University in New York said "Working Women" sheds new light on women and literature in 19th Century America.

"Cook's investigation of the literariness of women workers in industrializing America produces a revelatory cultural narrative," she said. "Her examination of the tension between 'the life of the mind' and the 'life of the body' as this is played out over time and populations, allows her to distill and highlight the complex interaction of gender and class. Cook contributes significantly to the burgeoning work on the history of class in the U.S."

"Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration" is 304 pages. It's available in paperback for $24.95 at St. Louis area bookstores, including the UMSL Bookstore & Computer Shop, Millennium Student Center, One University Boulevard, St. Louis, Mo.

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