Home/Bodies: Challenging Gendered Work Roles in Dorothy Canfield’s The Home-Maker

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Notes

¹ Dorothy Canfield published fifteen novels and many short stories under that name. Using her married name of Canfield Fisher, she was a prominent activist, working to promote adult education, prison reform, and many works of nonfiction. As The Home-Maker was published under Canfield, I use that name throughout.

² See Ann Oakley’s The Sociology of Housework, Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home, and Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class.

³ In her discussion of Canfield’s novel, The Brimming Cup, Jaime Harker suggests Canfield used her novels’ presence in popular magazines to promote cultural and political awareness in her readers.

⁴ In addition to work on American masculinity by Rotundo and Kimmel, see also Amy Kaplan, William Pollack, and Susan Bordo, among others.

⁵ For example, see Elizabeth J Wright’s “Home Economics: Children, Consumption, and Montessori Education in Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Understood Betsy and Suzanne Rahn’s “Empowering the Child:Rediscovering Dorothy Canfield’s Made-to-Order Stories.”

⁶ Writers such as Felicity Nussbaum, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Margaret Rose Terrell all discuss the feminization of the disabled body (Gore 364).