ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the efforts of feminist critics who have attempted to recuperate the work of writers like Meridel Le Sueur who have been marginalized or displaced in American literary history and introduces the concept of “testimony” into the critical discussion of Le Sueur and the wider debates over expanding the canon. Testimony, in this sense, has been used to describe the writings of Holocaust survivors, Japanese “comfort women,” and indigenous people of Central America, among others. Homeless women were objectified as sexual commodities almost without question. The widespread belief that women had a moral, even religious duty to attend to the domestic sphere helped justify the arguments made by charity organizations that homeless women posed a serious threat to the morals of others. Autobiographical forms in general, and tramp autobiographies in particular because of their ability to obscure the dangers faced by homeless women, fail to adequately represent the experience of women in poverty during the Depression.
