ABSTRACT
Cultural Production and the Politics of Women’s Work interrogates three common narratives of the first 60 years of the twentieth century: the rise of Fordism as a regimented, “masculine” mode of production and the transition to an era of “feminized” work; women’s liberation through the sexual revolutions; and the rise of a new form of literary authorship. By reading the emergence of secretarial work through a Gramscian lens, I suggest that women’s labor was integral to the operations of the Fordist business sphere. Unlike at the factory, in the white-collar office proletarian work was casualized and feminized. Cultural institutions followed this model as they admitted women as assistants, editors, and screenwriters, yet barred them from professional and managerial positions. Most accounts of women’s participation in modernism downplay this structure of disempowerment. I argue that the white-collar workplace was an important site of subject formation, affirming dominant discourses through economic practices. Analyzing work by Sinclair Lewis, Nella Larsen, Anita Loos, and Sylvia Plath, I present an alternative history of American modernism, one that is more attuned to gendered discourses of labor and class. By looking at the micropolitics of power within cultural institutions, this study moves beyond the dichotomies of exclusion/inclusion to interrogate the terms on which women and minorities worked as producers, and the ideas and experiences that consequently entered the field of intelligibility.
