"Keeping up her geography": Women's writing and geocultural space in early twentieth-century United States literature and culture

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dc.contributor.advisorLurie, Susanen_US
dc.creatorKennedy, Tanya Annen_US
dc.date.accessioned2009-06-04T06:30:18Zen_US
dc.date.available2009-06-04T06:30:18Zen_US
dc.date.issued2004en_US
dc.description.abstractI argue that the current trend in U.S. studies to move beyond the public-private dichotomy is based on a reductive understanding of that binary as primarily a manifestation of separate spheres ideology. Recently, literary critics and historians have argued that to use the language of separate spheres is to mistake fiction for reality. However, there is a tendency in this criticism to ignore the work of feminist political theorists who argue that a range of ideologies of public and private consistently work to mask the gendered inequalities of public policy. I claim that these inequalities are shaped by multiple, but interconnected, spatial constructions of the public and private in U.S. culture, and that emerging and intersecting (re) definitions of key spatial concepts---the nation, the urban, the regional, and the domestic---in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century provide a crucial context for understanding how the public-private binary has been constructed and contested. In chapter one, I focus on how women speakers at the World's Columbian Exposition negotiated their liminal position at the Exposition. Their understanding of the public-private binary is more complex than has been acknowledged and offers theorists new ways of understanding why the genderedness of the public-private binary. In chapter two, I show how middle-class women's anxieties about urbanization's transformation of the domestic leads to their contestation of the home-work divide that maintains the working-girl's social and economic inequality and isolates the middle-class woman. In chapter three, I argue that Ellen Glasgow challenges the southern agrarians' construction of the public-private binary by revealing its dependence on the female body and female labor. In chapter four, I contend that Zora Neale Hurston and Agnes Smedley negotiate the public-private binary by appropriating the frontier as a model of citizenship. This appropriation, however, becomes disenabling when they try to articulate the difference that the female body makes to citizenship.en_US
dc.format.extent195 p.en_US
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen_US
dc.identifier.callnoTHESIS ENGL. 2004 KENNEDYen_US
dc.identifier.citationKennedy, Tanya Ann. ""Keeping up her geography": Women's writing and geocultural space in early twentieth-century United States literature and culture." (2004) Diss., Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/18656">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/18656</a>.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1911/18656en_US
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.rightsCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.en_US
dc.subjectWomen's studiesen_US
dc.subjectAmerican literatureen_US
dc.title"Keeping up her geography": Women's writing and geocultural space in early twentieth-century United States literature and cultureen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US
dc.type.materialTexten_US
thesis.degree.departmentEnglishen_US
thesis.degree.disciplineHumanitiesen_US
thesis.degree.grantorRice Universityen_US
thesis.degree.levelDoctoralen_US
thesis.degree.nameDoctor of Philosophyen_US
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