On Being Shorn of Grace: Sentiments of Inequality: Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, Carolyn Kay Steedman

Abstract

Abstract:This essay is an effort to convey why Landscape for a Good Woman has held me fast for some 30 years of rereading and teaching with it, its attention to sentiment so vividly joining with my own work. Carolyn Steedman shatters the conventions of working-class histories, where a "stolid emotional sameness" erases the affective and material privations of those lives. Her understanding of social belonging and its exclusions is unique. She takes children's perceptions as "the very lineaments of adult political analysis." In her radical style, being demeaned, bitter, and defiant joins with longing for a sweeping skirt to make up the rough landscape of the "borderlands."