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Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea
Author(s): Laura Hapke (Author)
- Publisher: Rutgers University Press
- Publication Date: 29 July 2004
- Language: English
- Print length: 208 pages
- ISBN-10: 0813534666
- ISBN-13: 9780813534664
Book Description
Arguing that the sweatshop is as American as apple pie, Laura Hapke surveys over a century and a half of the language, verbal and pictorial, in which the sweatshop has been imagined and its stories told. Not seeking a formal definition of the sort that policymakers are concerned with, nor intending to provide a strict historical chronology, this unique book shows, rather, how the �real� sweatshop has become intertwined with the �invented� sweatshop of our national imagination, and how this mixture of rhetoric and myth has endowed American sweatshops with rich and complex cultural meaning. Hapke uncovers a wide variety of tales and images that writers, artists, social scientists, reformers, and workers themselves have told about �the shop.� Adding an important perspective to historical and economic approaches, Sweatshop draws on sources from antebellum journalism, Progressive era surveys, modern movies, and anti-sweatshop websites. Illustrated chapters detail how the shop has been a facilitator of assimilation, a promoter of upward mobility, the epitome of exploitation, a site of ethnic memory, a venue for political protest, and an expression of twentieth-century managerial narratives. An important contribution to the real and imagined history of garment industry exploitation, this book provides a valuable new context for understanding contemporary sweatshops that now represent the worst expression of an unregulated global economy.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Adding a critical new perspective to existing political, social, and economic histories, Laura Hapke has crafted a book the sweatshops of our imagination. Hers is an important project precisel because this particular spa for the production of goo carries extensive symbolic and political weight.-Eileen Boris, University of California at Santa Barbara
About the Author
Laura Hapke has taught working-class studies and labor literature at Pace University, Queens College, and Hunter College. Recipient of two Choice Outstanding Academic Book awards, her most recent book is Labor’s Text: The Worker in American Fiction.
