Getting back to a friend a few months after being
asked for my thoughts on a syllabus for teaching
a literature course on the theme of "Women & Work:
Just so you don't think I've been slacking off, I have been going around and around in my head trying to come up with something dealing with work issues and women's issues. I have not found the perfect solution. Everything I think of has a flaw, but I thought that just mentioning some of them to you might help you think of something else that would work.
First I thought of Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" (1853), then, jumping up to the 20th Century, Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney, both of which deal with work issues but have male narrators and very few women characters of any kind.
Then I thought of Moo by Jane Smiley, which is hilarious and fast and has several good women characters and deals with work -- but the work is academe, which is such a strange genre all of its own (i.e., novels about English departments; e.g., Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses, Stoner) that I don't know if it would work. But it does focus on some other departments as well (agriculture!) and deals with management and strategy issues -- but again all about the politics of running a university -- such a non-representative work world and probably not the area your students will specialize in. I don't know.
Then I thought of Anna Quindlen's great essay collections (Living Out Loud; Thinking Out Loud); you know I'm a fan -- for the most part. Of course, they're not fiction; however, you do get a good sense of her life as a woman and a working parent. In the same category is a book of essays that I'd recommend to you anyway, just for yourself (or your book group): How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed by Slavenka Drakulic. This is a book (very swift to read) to open your eyes and break your heart. She devotes a lot of coverage to her work as a journalist and occasional parenting conflicts with her teenage daughter.
There's Ellen Foster, but perhaps too young. An admirable girl, learning how to manage money and household accounts, but no real work experience as yet.
A novel I loved from my Ph.D. reading list is Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age (1977), which deals with commercial / business architecture and the use of public space (and other things, like emotional isolation, the banality of evil, and the lack of moral center in the late 20th Century, hence the "ice age"). Unfortunately, it doesn't focus much on women's issues, though it does contain female characters, a runaway daughter, a pregnant homeless woman, and the like, and it does make you think about the connection between inside work space (say, the offices of these architectural firms) and the workability of what's actually created for everyday use -- concrete islands where pedestrians are stranded, foul underground walkways, etc. More recent is The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer, but it paints such a bleak picture of work (and marriage and parenting).
As you can see, none of these are quite right, but I will keep thinking and try to write more soon. I'm getting tired and still have to go downstairs and wash the pots and pans. #Fun #SkulleryMaid #maidofallwork
