Labor and Desire

“An important work, providing insight into a little-examined area.” — Library Journal

“[A] fine examination of women’s revolutionary fiction of [the 1930s]” — American Studies

“This brilliant book makes an original and invaluable contribution to American literary history and to cultural studies. . . . [Rabinowitz] theorizes the relations among gender, genre, class, and consciousness in ways that unfailingly respect and illuminate the texts she has chosen to analyze. Because these texts themselves have been marginal to dominant accounts of American culture, this book rewrites literary history as it extends the terrain and terms on which feminism, materialism, and postmodernism can usefully meet.” — Deborah Rosenfelt, University of Maryland at College Park

“In a brillant analysis, Rabinowitz finds that the rhetoric of class struggle employed by male writers in the 1930s relied on gendered metaphors that portrayed the working class as masculine and virile while representing the bourgeoisie as feminine and corrupt.” — Signs

“[This] powerful and convincing analysis of the novels of Tillie Olsen, Meridel LeSueur, Josephine Herbst and Tess Slesinger, among others, suggests that the intersection of class and gender concerns led to a more subtle and assertive rendering of female subjects in the revolutionary novels of the 1930s.” — Women’s Review of Books

“In this powerful and illuminating study of radical women writers during the 1930s, Paula Rabinowitz deftly combines feminist literary theory with historically grounded social analysis. Her work exemplifies the rich promise of feminist scholarship in that it not only recovers and re-evaluates the suppressed writings of radical women, but it also explains with clarity and precision how gendered metaphors shaped the language of class conflict in 1930s America. Labor and Desire is not only a welcome addition to the intellectual and literary history of the 1930s, but it stands on its own as a powerful demonstration of the merits of combining feminist scholarship with a class analysis.” — George Lipsitz, University of California, San Diego

“Labor and Desire, a comprehensive study of women’s revolutionary novels of the 1930s, reveals the internal consistency — and variation — in a large body of literature by American women that is typically neglected in studies of both left-wing culture and women’s writing. Rabinowitz shows how this literature rewrites both the proletarian novel and the female literary tradition by responding to the interrelationship between gender and class. Her work merges context, text, and theory in an original and eminently satisfying study.” — Janet Sharistanian, University of Kansas