Striking fictions: Women writers and the making of a proletarian realism

The development of proletarian realism in the United States was part of a political strategy, although it was distinct from the Communist Party programme, which sought to portray a united, revolutionary working class. However, four of the earliest and most influential proletarian novels show that when writers focussed on women as both labouring and sexual subjects, the literary format was compelled to recognise a pattern of difference which conflicted with that goal of unity. Written in response to a 1929 textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, Mary Heaton Vorse's Strike! (1930). Grace Lumpkin's To Make My Bread (1932), Olive Tilford Dargan's Call Home the Heart (1932) and Dorothy Myra Page's Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (1932) all conflict with the very literary and political conventions in which they aim to operate and, in so doing, add a significant dimension to what has been generally regarded as a formulaic and predictable genre.