Silent witnesses

the long version

Through detailed analyses of documentary photography and radical literature, Silent Witnesses explores how working-class identity has been repressed and manipulated to fit the expectations of liberal politicians, radical authors, Marxist historians, feminist academics, and contemporary cultural theorists. This book shows how the silence of working-class women in American culture is constructed and reinforced in photographs by Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott, and in writing by Meridel Le Sueur. Nevertheless, using work by Esther Bubley and Tillie Olsen to suggest how working-class female identity might be represented in more complicated ways, Silent Witnesses also reveals a cultural and political context where the creative and intellectual power of individual working-class women can be fully expressed.