Review
“Liberating Voices makes an excellent contribution to educational history in general and composition history in particular. Karyn L. Hollis provides a detailed examination of the curricula at Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers and the forces that helped to shape it. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand how writing and education have motivated social change and social critique in other times.”—Susan Kates, author of Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education, 1885–1937
Product Description
Hollis provides a thorough ethnography of the Summer School with respect to its place in the social and political history of the 1920s and 1930s, and then situates the school’s pedagogy within the history of American education and composition instruction. Concepts from literary criticism and composition theory provide the framework for an analysis of the working women’s autobiographical writing, revealing how the narrative voice of their prose grew from weak and individualized to empowered and collective as the women described their families, childhood, work, unions, and education over time. Additional analysis of the women’s poetry points to their skill as both producers and consumers of literature. The common theme of body versus a powerful machine in the workplace bears witness to the industrial exploitation the women endured. Taking up postmodern questions of agency and voice, Hollis argues that the women used a variety of cultural texts to construct discourses that reflected their needs and desires. Liberating Voices not only provides a previously untold chapter in the history of American worker education, it also showcases a liberating pedagogy that has salient implications for contemporary classrooms.
