Essay Example on Ladies of Labor: Working Women, Popular Culture & Labor Politics

Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Nan Enstad's Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the twentieth Century explore the complicated relationship between political activism and consumer culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth-century working women. The book also examines the working-class women's application of popular culture as a significant resource to reconstruct their identity. According to Estad (1999), women's culture and integrity as both political actors and workers were shaped by consumerism even though they were not converted into radicals.

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The identity of working-class women has continuously been under discussion for decades. Attempts to understand their culture has been at the forefront of these discussions. On most occasions, working-class women invented their styles, such as brightly colored clothes and large hats that set them apart from the other social classes. Enstad (1999) also broaches this topic by examining how working-class women understood and used these products to create their own identities as workers, ladies, and Americans. She further explains the connection between novel plots and the status of working-class women by identifying how they viewed, bought, read, and imagined the fiction world. She further explains that women born in foreign countries but residing in the United States proudly purchased and read books in English as a form of Americanization. She also expounds the work of other authors on working-class fashion by identifying how imagining, purchasing, and wearing clothes helped working-class women to create their own cultures as workers, ladies, and as Americans. For instance, she noted that sometimes working-class women felt like ladies by wearing stylish middle-class dressings such as silk underwear.

Popular culture has been in existence and has been used for different purposes throughout history. Popular culture was significantly used during the shirtwaist strike of 1909. The author points out the uses of popular culture during this significant event in the United States as she first analyzes how striking women were represented. Furthermore, she noted that newspapers typically presented the striking women as fashion hounds and dismissed their claims for higher wages as irrational demands of disreputable women. The strikers took up another tact and dressed fashionably as charity cases that deserved to be identified as poor. According to Enstad (1999), this characterization deprived the striking women of any political agency. However, the labor leaders from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the Women's Trade Union League, and the Socialist Party perceived the striking women as political actors that fought against injustice. Union leaders also viewed the striking women as powerless victims and also viewed fashion as a symbol of irrationality. The author noted that historians have continued to dichotomize the political identity of working-class women due to their reliance n union records.

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

The book Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Faderman (1991) describe the romantic relationship of lesbians of all ages within six decades. The author attempts to capture profound and fundamental humanity within a culture that is often perceived as a perverse heteronormative community. The novel is based on the real-life experiences of the author to illustrate a tender, personal view of the evolution of lesbian identity in the United States. The book also demonstrates the inconsistence of tolerance and tolerance that lesbians faced throughout an era of immense social change.

The LGBTQ group has been under scrutiny for decades. The group has immensely evolved from being considered as illegal and immoral towards the path of acceptance and consideration. As such, the history of this particular group is often overlooked and ignored. Freidman (1991) explores the personal narratives of lesbians from 1960 through to the 1960s. The author incorporates tales of real women who have contributed to reshaping the subcultures as well as lifestyles without being defined from the outside by the existing heteronormative culture. The book makes a considerable contribution to the history of a group that would otherwise be interred with its early twentieth century Sapphic lovers.

Furthermore, the book identifies the various challenges that lesbians faced throughout history and how they dealt with the existing obstacles to accomplish peaceful and fulfilling lives. This book played a significant role in safeguarding the narratives of the minority group. The author attempts to protect the history of lesbianism from exploitative and objectifying nature of heteronormative male perception that is portrayed by modern-day media channels.

Conclusion

The Second World War had a crucial effect on lesbians and women in general. During the Second World War, women worked in the factories as men fought in the war. Often, the women had to wear trousers or pants when going to the factories. Before the war, only gay women wore pants, and it was unheard of for ordinary women to wear trousers. Freidman (1991), in her book, discusses an article written in the newspaper with a woman wearing pants in the 1930s and how much it was a shock for the women to wear trousers. The author explained that even after the war, girls were not allowed to wear trousers when going to school. Nevertheless, the author comments that the Second World War lessened the shock of women wearing pants since ordinary women were required to wear trousers when working in the factories as opposed to the years before the war when women were not allowed to wear trousers unless they were gay.

References

Enstad, N. (1999). Ladies of labor, girls of adventure: Working women, popular culture, and labor politics at the turn of the twentieth century. Columbia University Press.

Faderman, L. (1991). Odd girls and twilight lovers: A history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America. Columbia University Press.