History 246 Reading Guide
Working-Class Women: The “Uprising of the 20,000” and the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. Factory Fire
Films:
- Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl: A Documentary Produced by the American Social History Project (1993).
- New York: A Documentary, directed by Ric Burns (PBS 1999).
Further readings:
- Clara Laughlin, The Work-a-Day Girl (1913).
- Dorothy Richardson, The Long Day (1905).
- Christine Stansell, “The Origins of the Sweatshop: Women and Early Industrialization in New York City,” in M.H. Frisch and D.J. Walkowitz, Working Class America (1983), 78-103. [in Jean Friedman and William Shade, Our American Sisters 4th ed. (1987)].
- Alice Kessler-Harris, “Where are the Organized Women Workers?” Feminist Studies 3 (1975), 92-110. [in Nancy Cott and Elizabeth Pleck, A Heritage of her Own (1979)].
- Susan Levine, “Labor’s True Woman: Domesticity and Equal Rights in the Knights of Labor,” Journal of American History 70 (1983), 323-339. JSTOR
Questions:
As we watch the two documentary films in class, think about these two broad questions:
- What strikes you about the differences in the two accounts of working-class women in New York City in 1909—in film technique, in context, in focus and emphasis?
- What is the significance of those differences?
Second Critical Analysis due (primary document written between 1800 and 1900).
- Charles Schulz, Peanuts (9/25/1984; 8/20/1986):
