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Abstract
The contention of this study is that literary criticism has tended to overlook the issue of class as a legitimate concern for both writers and critics. Consonant with this issue is the feminist interest in "lost" women writers and in redefining standards for literary analysis. The dissertation combines these two concerns in a socialist-feminist study of Edith Summers Kelley's Weeds, Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth, Tillie Olsen's Yonnodio: From the Thirties, and Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker. The study presumes the efficacy of protest literature as having aesthetic as well as historical merit and traces such socialist-feminist themes as classism, sexism, industrialization, war, rape, marriage, abortion, and motherhood in terms of personal experience made political awareness. It calls for a re-envisioning of "mainstream" literature to allow for the working-class reality these four women writers express and also calls the reader's attention to lost masterpieces of the proletarian genre in American letters, and to lost works by women in general in the hope that these writers will be accorded the audience they deserve and that critics will investigate the as yet unmined area of lost women writers.
With the focus on the experiences of poor women, it is hoped that readers and critics see not only the importance of redefining the realities we traditionally perceive as appropriate to literature, but also the political truths inherent in the lives of working-class women. The struggle to survive at the most critical socioeconomic level is an act of heroism that can teach women and critics alike new perceptions of the act of criticism, reader response, and, finally, life itself as reflected in the characters' experiences and our interpretations of them.
