| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Modern Women, Modern Work: Domesticity, Professionalism, and American Writing, 1890–1950. By Francesca Sawaya. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 198 pp. $42.50, ISBN 0-8122-3743-9.)

Modern Women, Modern Work asks what it means to be a woman professional. Arguing for connections between Victorianism and modernism, Francesca Sawaya plays out professional-domestic binaries in readings of regionalist works by Sarah Orne Jewett, Jane Addams, and Pauline Hopkins; journalism and professional writing by Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Ida Tarbell, and Willa Cather; and anthropological writings by Ruth Benedict and Zora Neale Hurston. A central chapter analyzes sentimental naturalism in works by Frank Norris and George Santayana. Sawaya examines each reading through lenses of gender, race, and class. What comes into focus does not so much surprise as correct. Connections between Victorianism and modernism are indeed robust. Racism and class bias, conflicted views of gender, and transcendent attitudes toward domesticity shaped the writing of white women. Countervailing, historically situated understandings of professionalism and domesticity emerge in black women's writing.

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