Graduation Year

2024

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

English

Second Department

Politics and International Relations

Reader 1

Thomas Koenigs

Reader 2

Mar Golub

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

@ 2023 Mena K Bova

Abstract

"I only ask for a chance to be a useful, happy woman," exclaims main character Christie Devon in the opening pages of Louisa May Alcott's Work: A Story of Experience. Unsurprisingly, much of Work is focused on labor: over the book's span of twenty years, Christie participates in many forms of work, from waged labor to domestic labor to religious labor. While much of the existing scholarship about Work focuses on Christie's experiences in the world of external, waged labor, this thesis contends that Christie's experiences with domestic labor has been a historically overlooked area. Using a social reproduction theory framework, as explained by theorists like Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser, to analyze the politics and gendering of labor in the novel, this thesis suggests that Alcott valorizes waged, external work as concrete labor while downplaying domestic, reproductive work as woman's inherent nature. Furthermore, while Alcott attempts to expand conceptions of "acceptable" female labor in Work, her ultimate endorsement of the domestic sphere as the place for women serves as an acceptance of implicit gender norms that help to naturalize unpaid reproductive labor as women's work, as well as legitimize the underlying capitalist structures of the market economy Christie lives in. Even Christie's time in the world of external, waged work and the resulting labor reform attempts she undertakes afterwards only ultimately serve to reform capitalism in a way that entrenches it, rather than truly challenging or diminishing it.

Download

Share

COinS