Working Matters makes a critical intervention in American Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Literary Studies scholarship by examining regional and transnational intersections of gender, racial, sexual, and immigration politics in representations of women's work. I argue that late nineteenth-century narratives of upward economic and social mobility achieved through hard work, morality, and assimilation were used to explain and conceal racial, class, and gender struggles within the diverse international contexts of two major U.S. port cities, San Francisco and New Orleans. It is especially crucial to reexamine these ostensibly egalitarian narratives of upward mobility because they registered and contributed to nascent and narrowing ideologies of national consolidation and expansion based on practices of racial exclusion, class hierarchies, nativist distinctions between immigrants and native-born people, and gender differences during a pivotal U.S. interwar period, 1865 to 1898.
In particular, Working Matters examines often-neglected representations of working women, specifically sex workers, sewing women, and domestic workers, in the short fiction of Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Grace King. I argue that these writers were engaged in crucial social, cultural, and political debates taking place in the West and the South, respectively, as well as across the nation even though some scholars have classified them as regionalists or sentimentalists. Juxtaposing their fiction with laws and journalism forces us to confront economic, immigration, and legal conflicts over gender-biased labor laws such as the 1875 Page Law, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. Equally important, this dissertation positions San Francisco and New Orleans as vital centers of migration as significant as New York, thus challenging the often-assumed paradigm stressing nineteenth-century European immigration to the East Coast. Looking to these other major port cities allows us to see a competing history, one that has often been downplayed and that exposes U.S. imperialism abroad, especially in Asia and the Caribbean, as well as internal imperialism on the continent in the former Mexican territories.
