Between Revolution and Reform: Anzia Yezierska's Labor Politics

When Alexandra Kollontai addressed the First National Congress of Women Workers in November of 1918, she used the story of Cinderella to add some punch to her remarks. As Elizabeth A. Wood recounts, the famous feminist revolutionary "painted a vivid picture of women's suffering under capitalism, telling her listeners that they were like Cinderella waiting for a liberator prince who would show up in a golden carriage. `But comrades, we are done with princes, and the golden carriages have all been expropriated. Your liberator is the worker, but he doesn't have anything.'" Arguing that women were themselves needed as "builders of a new, more just, more perfect Communist order," Kollontai called for the end of traditional "forms of marriage, of housework, and of motherhood."¹ Her speech offers a pointed contrast to the radical women's labor culture that emerged at roughly at the same time in the United States. Young Italian and East European Jewish immigrants in the garment industry played a leading role in developing this culture, which wove a love of fashion, romance-adventure fiction and Hollywood film into a distinctive form of labor militancy. Anchored in the Cinderella plot of their favorite dime novels, where "marriage to the wealthy hero" stood as "the ultimate reward" for a working girl's fearless clashes with adversity, this culture inspired the famous New York City shirtwaist strike of 1909–10 and went on to yield a series of historic victories in the teens.² But it also cast marriage and stay-at-home mothering as the proper reward for work-place activism in one's youth.

During the same period, the AFL focused its own fight on securing a "living wage" (later called a "family wage") for its white male workers.³ The strike culture that working girls created allowed women to assert new forms of leadership and independence on the job but it endorsed, rather than challenged, Hollywood's and the AFL's preferred `happy ending' for women under capitalism. Meanwhile, in Russia that same happy ending was being tossed out with the golden carriage. Following passage of the revolutionary Family Code of 1918, the state began setting up trial communal kitchens and nurseries in urban centers. In 1920, Kollontai began a two-year stint as the Director of Zhenotdel, which oversaw women's revolutionary activities, and used her position to promote a model of socialist marriage in which "the public upbringing of children" secured the right of both working parents to sexual and creative self-fulfillment. In the same years, prominent members of the Russian avant-garde began to redesign common household articles such as beds, cookware and clothing as part of the larger societal effort to create a novyi byt, or new everyday life.⁴

In this essay, I argue for the need to read Anzia Yezierska's domestic novels of the 1920s in this double context. Uniformly set on the Lower East Side, all three novels—Salome of the Tenements (1923), Bread Givers (1925), and Arrogant Beggar (1927)—rework the Cinderella plot central to working girls' labor culture along lines that resonate strongly with the revolutionary ideals of Kollontai and other Russian intellectuals. When read in conjunction with one another, the novels present a new neighborhood ideal, one in which working-class women re-assign various forms of domestic labor to the public sphere in order to escape age-old oppression and enrich the common lot.⁵ Reading Yezierska's major fiction in this way not only sheds new light on the novels themselves; it also resolves troubling inconsistencies in her reputation as a writer and forces us to question long-sanctioned critical arguments about the avant-garde and its radical relationship to modernism and mass culture.

As critics love to recount, Yezierska herself enjoyed brief fame as a "Sweatshop Cinderella" when she received a Goldwyn contract in 1921 to adapt her story collection, Hungry Hearts, to the screen. But she later sank into obscurity. Feminists revived her work in the 1970s. Since then, scholars reading along lines of gender and ethnicity have regularly celebrated the "radical"—even...