The Quill #6: AWE News #3

Professor Ann Mattis recently published Dirty Work: Domestic Service in Progressive-Era Women’s Fiction, (University of Michigan Press, 2019). Mattis focused her work on how early 20th-century literature, including female-authored works, portrayed complex relationships between women employers and their household help, bringing light to class, race, and social anxieties. The book examines how domestic workers were portrayed as threats to the nuclear family, and how this played important roles in first-wave feminism and the New Negro movements. Mattis reveals the hidden influence of domestic service in shaping cultural narratives of modern femininity. By showcasing the inequalities, Dirty Work: Domestic Service in Progressive-Era Women’s Fiction urges readers and writers to recognize the inadvertent stereotypes embedded in literature and the detrimental effect that they can have on our society.