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2 / Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread: Standing Together, Side by Side For so long each had been alone with his family striving after enough food to keep from starving. . . . Now they were going to stand together, side by side . . . —grace lumpkin, to make my bread (333) Published in 1932, inspired by the events of the 1929 textile mill strikes in Gastonia, North Carolina,1 Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread was praised by reviewers as both a “beautiful and sincere novel” and “very good, very effective propaganda” (Vorse, Review, 104; Cantwell, Review, 372). In his critique of the novel, Roy Flanagan observes that “Miss Lumpkin writes well and honestly, and her book provides horrible but salutary instruction from beginning to end” (Review, 560). Another reviewer in the New York Times defends Lumpkin against common criticisms leveled against proletarian writers for being overly didactic by arguing that “[i]t is the sort of propaganda novel to which no sneer can be legitimately attached—which is to say that its meaning rises out of people in dramatic conflict with other people and with the conditions of their life. . . . Here, she says, is this family; this is what happened to them when they were torn from their roots and set down in alien surroundings” (“A Novel of the Southern Mills,” BR7). Robert Cantwell, the novelist who had called To Make My Bread “very effective propaganda,” concludes his review in the Nation by stating, “I cannot imagine how anyone could read it and not be moved by it” (372). Thus, the novel was successful not just in its portrayal of working-class experience but also in its ability to affect readers on an emotional level. Lumpkin was a descendent of the southern aristocracy and a member of the middle class, although she experienced periods of poverty during her lifetime. She closely observed and interacted with sharecroppers , mill workers, Appalachian mountain folk, and participants 24 / grace lumpkin’s to make my bread in the Gastonia strikes, but she was a witness and not a member of the groups whose stories she tells.2 Although Lumpkin may have included a representation of herself—and those who generally occupy her subject position—as Miss Gordon, the misguided, middle-class demonstration agent who feels sorry for the poor, she chose not to write To Make My Bread from a middle-class perspective. Rather than objectify the working class and extend sympathy outwardly toward them (following the standard operation of nineteenth-century sentimental texts), Lumpkin narratively appropriates and inhabits the position of Other in order to overcome the limits of earlier forms of sentimentalism and address the gendered challenges of writing proletarian fiction. To Make My Bread serves as an example of both colonial and postcolonial sympathy, in that Lumpkin inhabits the subjectivity of the working-class Other for whom she seeks to develop sympathy. She adopts this mode as a way to create space within proletarian literature for the female voice. Traditionally, proletarian literature required that its subjects and voices be male; female writers had a difficult time addressing the concerns of working-class women or being taken seriously as proletarian writers. Critics such as Constance Coiner, Barbara Foley, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Charlotte Nekola, and Paula Rabinowitz have demonstrated that women writing revolutionary fiction in the 1930s were caught in the competing demands of Marxism, which dictated that all class struggle was the same for men and women, and the masculinized dictates of proletarian realists who demanded that authors write from real-life experiences drawn from the male-dominated industries of fields, mines, mills, and factories. Rabinowitz argues that female intellectuals in the Communist Party found few accepted outlets for expression within the emerging proletarian genre because of the association of a feminine literary tradition with the middle class and the assumption that appropriate topics for proletarian literature excluded women’s issues: “[T]he aesthetics of 1930s literary radicalism stressed the importance of external social forces in shaping literary work. This shift of emphasis denied a feminine literary tradition to the 1930s woman writer and separated her from her bourgeois female literary precursors” (Labor and Desire, 178). Male writers and theorists dominated literary scholarship, serving “as artistic and intellectual gatekeepers,” who, according to Hall, “often misrecognized the work of radical women writers who saw gender—intertwined with race and class—as a symbol of human powerlessness and a key determinant of people’s lives. That misrecognition sometimes took the form of overt dismissal and condescension...

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