EBOOK
Unorganized Women
Repetitive Rhetorical Labor and Low-Wage Workers, 1834-1937
Jane GreerSeries: Composition, Literacy, and Culture(0)
About
Across a range of industrial, domestic, and agricultural sites, Greer shows how repetitive discursive performances served as rhetorical tools as women workers sought to rescript power relations in their workplaces and to resist narratives about their laboring lives. The case studies reveal noteworthy patterns in how these women's words helped to construct the complex web of class relations in which they were enmeshed. Rather than a teleological narrative of economic empowerment over the course of a century, Unorganized Women speaks to the enduring obstacles low- and no-wage women face, their creativity and resilience in the face of adversity, and the challenges that impede the creation of meaningful coalitions. By focusing on repetitive rhetorical labor, this book affords a point of entry for analyzing the discursive productions of a range of women workers and for constructing a richer history of women's rhetoric in the United States.
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Reviews
"This book offers deeply compelling and rich analyses of working women's repetitive labor and makes a significant contribution to the growing field of rhetorical studies working at the nexus of gender, rhetoric, and labor. Greer focuses on a group of women not often studied even within this new body of work: low-wage workers. By applying her keen analyses to this group's rhetorics, Greer offers im
Jess Enoch, University of Maryland
"Unorganized Women makes highly original contributions to scholarly conversations in the field. Historians and theorists of rhetoric-even those interested in women's rhetorics and working-class rhetorics-have rarely turned their attention to the rhetorical labors of low-wage women, and I know of no other scholarship in rhetoric that expressly seeks to synthesize or juxtapose the rhetorical practic
Bill DeGenaro, University of Michigan–Dearborn