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Overview
Tracing the Victorian literary crisis over the representation of working-class women to the 1842 parliamentary blue book on mines and its controversial images of women at work, Hidden Hands argues that the female industrial worker became more dangerous to represent than the prostitute or the male radical because the worker exposed crucial contradictions between the class and gender ideologies of the period and its economic realities.Synopsis
Tracing the Victorian literary crisis over the representation of working-class women to the 1842 parliamentary blue book on mines and its controversial images of women at work, Hidden Hands argues that the female industrial worker became more dangerous to represent than the prostitute or the male radical because the worker exposed crucial contradictions between the class and gender ideologies of the period and its economic realities.
Booknews
Though women's work in factories fueled the Industrial Revolution, their labor, and sometimes even their existence, is hidden in the Victorian stories classed as industrial novels. Drawing on the recent work of feminist historians, Johnson (literature and humanities, Pennsylvania State U.,- Capital College) examines social-problem fiction by Disraeli, Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, Kipling, Charlotte Bront<:e>, and others to draw out the authors' treatment of issues that particularly affected working-class women. The issues include sexual harassment, the connections between domestic ideology and domestic violence, women's relationships to male-dominated workers' movements such as Luddism and Chartism, and working women's troubled connection to middle-class feminism. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)