City Housekeeping: Women's Labor Rhetorics and Spaces for Solidarity, 1886-1911

Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms

Series Editors: Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan

City Housekeeping offers feminist rhetoricians new insight into labor rhetorics, a term the author develops to investigate how gender saturates and is shaped by the myriad material and discursive practices that reproduce and support life (in its social, material, political, and biological senses). Focusing on the material, spatial, visual, and discursive rhetorics associated with labor organizing in, around, and beyond Hull House in Chicago, Malinowski's project brings together labor history, gendered history, rhetorical history, and carefully situated analysis of spatial and temporal rhetorics. . . . I loved the author's attentiveness to internal variation and disagreement. -Risa Applegarth, Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

City Housekeeping: Women's Labor Rhetorics and Spaces for Solidarity, 1886-1911 investigates how women reimagined gendered labor discourse by making space for women to be included in setting demands, negotiating with employers, and challenging industrial progress narratives. A feminist rhetorical historiography, the book focuses on women brought together by Jane Addams's Hull House Settlement in Chicago. These women negotiated gender and labor expectations alongside ethnic and racial tensions kindled by the confluence of mass migration and increased competition for work, housing, and visibility in the rapidly growing city. Tensions rose as middle-class social reformers turned to consumer-focused strategies that commodified the racial identities of Irish, Italian, and Jewish garment workers and sidelined the immediate needs of laborers. Meanwhile, immigrant women garment workers turned to strikes to resist the terms of exploitative manufacturers, challenging consumer-driven solutions in the process.

City Housekeeping illuminates women's ways of reshaping rhetorical spaces to be more inclusive of women and gendered ways of communicating about labor. As the book historicizes the emergence of a women's labor movement in Chicago, it reveals how women combined the multiple rhetorical modes of speech, writing, visuals, and movement to claim the space and authority needed to participate in reimagining labor at home and work.

Liane Malinowski is an assistant professor of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her essays have been published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and Rhetoric Review. Her research and teaching focus on feminist rhetorics, rhetorical history, archival methods, and public writing.