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Jacqueline Ellis, Silent Witnesses: Representations of Working-Class Women in the United States. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1998. ix + 259 pp. $32.95 cloth; $15.95 paper.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2001

Miriam Cohen
Affiliation:
Vassar College

Abstract

Among the radical intellectuals of the thirties devoted to depicting the lives of the American working class were women who paid special attention to the lives of their working-class sisters. Few, if any, were able to overcome their own middle-class perspectives, their gendered assumptions, and, ultimately, the reality of political and economic inequality in order to truly render agency to their female subjects. Jacqueline Ellis's study examines some important efforts to represent working-class women: first, the works of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers, Dorthea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, and Esther Bubley; then, writers, Meridel Le Sueur and Tillie Olsen. Ellis leaves the reader with an appreciation of their attempts and an understanding of the vast limitations of their endeavors.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Copyright
© 1999 The International Labor and Working-Class History Society

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