“Finding Your Way When Lost”: Class and the American Girl

Abstract

This paper looks at the disappearance of working-class women from the dominant imaginary of literary and popular fiction and argues that this figure has been displaced by a contemporary interest in girlhood. I analyze contemporary fictions of young white women that engage with and challenge ideas of normative American girlhood in late capitalism, showing how the texts take up issues of sexual oppression and pathology, maternal failure, and consumerism that sometimes destabilize but more often normalize economic oppression. In February 2016, the Huffington Post published a blog entry by Leo Girard, the International President of United Steelworkers, entitled “TPP would further Emasculate America,” in which America’s working-class past is mourned as an emasculation — its once “big shoulders” now “stooped” as “America’s tool makers and freight car builders are furloughed.” This imagining of the American working-class in masculine terms is not new, but it is surprising to see such an uncritical association of working America with masculinity in the 21 century. In the past forty years, this frame for understanding the intersection of class, labor and gender has been disrupted by new economic structures, civil rights movements, and feminism. And yet, as historian Elizabeth Faue has argued, until recently even labor historians “remained committed to an understanding of class consciousness and class politics that was public, production-centered, and predominantly white and male” (20). Similarly, in her essay, “Class Absences,” Vivyan Adair argues that the working class has most often been symbolized by “families with male heads of households” those “rough,” “diligent workers” that “embody and enjoy independence, legal heterosexuality, autonomy, logic, and order . . . ‘respectability. . . frugality, decency and self-discipline’” (25). These traditional depictions put distance between the working class and more diverse but also more stigmatized images associated with those at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy. Moreover, these popular images often hold in place the associations of class and whiteness so that workingclass iconicity is not only resolutely masculine, but historicized through the white racial frame. Adair asks us to consider the consequences of imagining class oppression in terms of “white male injury” for the poor women who are excluded from this image of class oppression and more likely to be portrayed as economic and sexual deviants. Comparably, the best-selling works of Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In and Hannah Rosin's The End of Men gave recession-era prominence to stories of professional working women on the rise, but these texts are relatively free of the images and voices of working-class and poor women. Focused on the rise of women in the corporate workplace and the “end of men,” these authors marginalize the stories of women who work at the bottom of the economic pyramid. No images that match those of the past such as Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era Migrant Mother or the based on a true story 1970s film Norma Rae have emerged as iconic representations of laboring women in the 21 century. Instead, cultural interest in working-class women seems to have been displaced by an attentiveness to the lives of girls. As Anita Harris summarizes in her book Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century: “Since the early 1990s young womanhood has become a topic central to debates within Western societies about cultural and economic change. Popular culture, public policy, academic inquiry, and the private sector are now interested in young women in ways that are quite unprecedented” (13). She uses the contrasting images of the “can-do” and the “at-risk” girl to explore dominant ways of thinking about girlhood in the contemporary West. According to Harris, the new “intense interest” in girls “suggests that what it means to prevail or lose out in these new times has become bound up with how we understand girlhood” (14). She defines the “can-do” girl as “‘girls with the world at their feet’ . . . identifiable by their commitment to exceptional careers and career planning, their belief in their capacity to invent themselves and succeed, and their display of a consumer lifestyle” (14). On the other hand, the “at-risk” girl is “alienated” and “self destructive,” engaged in “inappropriate consumer behaviors” and sexual risk taking. Harris argues that this framing of girls tends to focus on narratives of individual empowerment in which young women's economic and cultural dominance is the norm, and, thus, these cultural positions “are never articulated as classed and raced positions” (Harris 34). Harris points out that not only are the structural causes of young women's poverty ignored, but that the girls' economic and social contributions are systemically exploited for the purposes of cultural and economic profit. In the “at-risk” discourse, girls threaten the “desired futures” of capital (Peter Kelly qtd. in Harris 25) rather than being necessary to the functioning of capitalist hierarchy. This discourse assumes that a good future — defined by the dominant values of capitalist patriarchy — is available to all. Harris attributes the hegemony of this discourse to the developing structures of neoliberalism with policies and rhetoric that assimilate young women into competitive structures of the marketplace and the pleasures of consumerism; both policies and rhetoric compel them to avoid forms of collective organizing against injustice that might jeopardize their carefully cultivated ambitions and future economic security. In this paper, I examine some of the ways that this discourse of the “at-risk” girl structures contemporary literary fiction and how these fictions represent the economic and social conditions of working-class life in terms of its coding of sexual pathology and family dysfunction as the dangers that must be managed by the “at-risk” girl. If, as Sarah Projansky argues, the can-do/at-risk dichotomy codes a mostly unarticulated whiteness and heteronormativity (9), then it is also a means of folding structures of economic domination into the imaginary construct of girlhood and ignoring the increasing inequality among women. This imaginary is perfectly illustrated in a recent American Girl Doll campaign that seems to promote the identity of “girl” over and above any other axis of identity. The campaign's commercial, ”The Pledge,” is based on the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States' flag, so the voiceover narration of the girl speaker has the rhythm and cadence of that pledge: st