In “Perplexities Enough:" The Bodies and Minds of Working Class Women, I look at how working class women described, experienced, used, and rhetorically constructed their bodies and minds for power in the first half of the twentieth century. I compare these sensibilities as workers with their middle class contemporaries’ constructions of them. My analysis draws on recent discussions in labor history which view the body as a possible avenue for integrating materialism and linguistic analysis to bring into focus female subjects. Ava Baron and Eileen Boris, for example, have called for studies which center the body in the practice of labor history to, among other things, dislodge the male physical form as paradigmatic. The paper brings together two strands of research which connect my scholarship in coal mining women and, in turn, more recent interest in labor education.

All papers are pre-circulated electronically to those who plan to attend the seminar in person. For a copy of the paper, e-mail Heather Radke at scholl@newberry.org,or call (312) 255-3524.

The Newberry Library Seminar in Labor History is co-sponsored by the History Departments of Northern Illinois University, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Labor and Working Class History Association