The Art of Unemployment: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Search for Work

Abstract

The Art of Unemployment narrates the twin development of professional women’s authorship and the category of unemployment in nineteenth-century America, shedding new light on the former and first light on the latter. Scholars of American literary history have established the nineteenth century as a pivotal period of professionalization for women’s authorship in which women like Louisa May Alcott, Fanny Fern, and others of import to this study achieved great popularity and financial success in their careers. But in our attentiveness to the art of working as a woman writer in this period, we have missed the efforts these same writers invested in giving expression to unemployment in the nineteenth century. This period in American history witnessed dynamic booms and busts, financial panics, and influential developments in unemployment policy, yet it remains overshadowed by the 1930s in studies on American unemployment. My project narrates the emerging concept of unemployment in nineteenth-century America—as it was imagined in women’s fiction and poetry and as it actually existed in the period. Combining economic and literary history, The Art of Unemployment provides a new understanding of the conflict between success and failure in models of nineteenth-century women’s authorship and prompts a larger reconsideration of what it means to be unemployed.The specter of unemployment looms large in the novels and poems nineteenth-century American women wrote about their chosen work, even and especially when those women experienced professional success. Authors Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Fanny Fern, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Frances E.W. Harper were some of the most profitable and popular writers of their time, yet their accounts of authorship force us to dwell in the crises of unemployment that attend professional literary pursuits—crises they describe as financial, emotional, social, and aesthetic. Unemployment gave successful women writers a language to critique the aspirational models of work that readers both past and present regularly ascribe to their professional biographies. That this subject causes some of the most successful nineteenth-century American women writers to question why and what they write warrants asking what unemployment does to the stories we tell ourselves about professional development and success.