Calling Home: Working-Class WomenÆs Writings Review
Janet Zandy strives to bring us snapshots, thoughts, and memories of the lives of working class and immigrant women through poetry, testimonials, histories, and short stories. Perhaps the most compelling selections from this anthology are those that deal with the tragedy of the Triangle shirtwaist fire and its aftermath, as Zandy rightly lends that seminal event a key place in the history of the women’s and labor movements. It serves as a suitable classroom companion for students of gender studies, women’s history, labor history, and United States history. Overall, a fascinating read, to be consumed as a whole or in small sections, savory and intimate.
Calling Home: Working-Class WomenÆs Writings Overview
“Meridel Le Sueur, Barbara Smith, Nellie Wong, Judy Grahn, and Sharon Doubiago are among the writers who range through speeches, songs, poetry, essays, and fiction in this moving anthology.” –Ms. Magazine “Powerful in their dailiness, and full of memory, frustration, endurance, and occasionally a softer emotion, these affecting selections deserve a wide audience.” –Feminist Bookstore News “The range of voices raised and experiences represented throughout the book is expansive and liberating, as is the inclusion of any number of unforgettable works by lesser-known writers.” –VLS “Ambitious, eclectic, historically wide-ranging. . . . The multicultural (primarily American) contents range from pieces by Agnes Smedley and Mother Jones to contemporary activist storytellers such as Marge Piercy. . . . The authors . . . write proudly and gratefully about the benefits of working-class life . . . a brave anthology, a very welcome addition to the workbench, the kitchen table, and the bookcase.” –Women’s Review of Books “Rich . . . archival and popular.” –Belles Lettres “Their voices . . . form a chorus that speaks for the majority of women in the United States. They are writers whose theme is the working-class woman, and the ethnic, racial and geographic diversity of the working-class experience.” –San Francisco Examiner “Zandy’s anthology . . . helps us better understand who ‘we’ are and how many of us have been missing from the stories our culture teaches and learns.” –The Literary Review “A powerful and uncompromising collection of essays, stories, poems, and oral histories, and more, reflecting the history and personal experiences of working-class women in America.” –Booklist “What diversity! . . . The works reveal a complexity of working-class experience intricately linked like pieces in a giant jigsaw puzzle.” –New Directions for Women Janet Zandy is a professor of language and literature at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She has published widely on women’s issues.
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