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Reich, Stephanie Turner

English

2004

M.A.

The influx of middle-class women into the world of corporate professionalism has resulted in a rift in contemporary feminism along the lines of race and class. Women's leaving the home as wage earners is facilitated by working-class, often immigrant, women performing reproductive labor in private homes. Yet, the US government and media consistently represent immigrants and the working poor as a drain on social services, focusing only on what the lower classes take from rather than what they contribute to society. This thesis explores the ways fictional texts written by women unconsciously either support or refute dominant stereotypes of immigrant and domestic laborers in their narrative strategy. In Chapter One, I discuss what I term "mainstream women's fiction," and the ways in which immigrant and domestic workers are made invisible or represented as burdens within the texts. Critical readings of Allison Pearson's 1 Don't Know How She Does It and Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus's The Nanny Diaries examine how the novels marginalize immigrant women characters as they celebrate the middle-class, white working mother.
Chapter Two focuses on two postcolonial women's texts, Loida Maritza Perez's Geographies of Home and Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy. I discuss how these texts, by featuring the points of view of immigrant laborers, revise the stereotype of the immigrant worker. My conclusion considers the endings of Geographies of Home and Lucy, discussing how the lack of closure relates to the immigrant experience. I locate these texts amongst other non-fictional works which seek to subvert dominant society's dehumanization of working-class immigrants.