Calling Home: Working-class Women's Writings

Jacket Description/Back: 'A powerful and uncompromising collection of essays, stories, poems, and oral histories, and more, reflecting the history and personal experiences of workingclass women in America.'--BooklistPublisher Marketing: "Meridel Le Sueur, Barbara Smith, Nellie Wong, Judy Grahn, and Sharon Doubiago are among the writers who range through speeches, songs, poetry, essays, and fiction in this moving anthology." --Ms. Magazine "Powerful in their dailiness, and full of memory, frustration, endurance, and occasionally a softer emotion, these affecting selections deserve a wide audience." --Feminist Bookstore News "The range of voices raised and experiences represented throughout the book is expansive and liberating, as is the inclusion of any number of unforgettable works by lesser-known writers." --VLS "Ambitious, eclectic, historically wide-ranging. . . . The multicultural (primarily American) contents range from pieces by Agnes Smedley and Mother Jones to contemporary activist storytellers such as Marge Piercy. . . . The authors . . . write proudly and gratefully about the benefits of working-class life . . . a brave anthology, a very welcome addition to the workbench, the kitchen table, and the bookcase." --Women's Review of Books "Rich . . . archival and popular." --Belles Lettres "Their voices . . . form a chorus that speaks for the majority of women in the United States. They are writers whose theme is the working-class woman, and the ethnic, racial and geographic diversity of the working-class experience." --San Francisco Examiner "Zandy's anthology . . . helps us better understand who 'we' are and how many of us have been missing from the stories our culture teaches and learns." --The Literary Review "A powerful and uncompromising collection of essays, stories, poems, and oral histories, and more, reflecting the history and personal experiences of working-class women in America." --Booklist "What diversity! . . . The works reveal a complexity of working-class experience intricately linked like pieces in a giant jigsaw puzzle." --New Directions for Women Janet Zandy is a professor of language and literature at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She has published widely on women's issues.