Post-Feminist Puritanism: Teaching (and Learning from) The Lowell Offering in the 21st Century

Abstract

Based on an analysis of classroom discussions and online reading responses, this essay explores how an all-women group of University of Pittsburgh undergraduates responded to The Lowell Offering, a collection of writings by mid-19^th century women textile workers. While Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg equates “leaning in” to claim one’s place in the male-dominated corporate world with youthful feminist success, what to make of the inspiration these ambitious women students found in puritanical representations of self-sacrificial factory girls? Far from being a sign of substantive progress in women’s rights, the author argues that the “post-feminist” discursive environment shaping these students’ sense of themselves as twenty-first century women workers is rather a symptom of the mutually reinforcing relationship between neoliberal market imperatives and traditional femininity.