Description
Between the Civil War and World War I, David Leverenz maintains, the corporate transformation of American work created widespread desire for upward mobility along with widening class divisions. In his view, several significant narrative constructs, notably the daddy's girl and the daddy's boy, emerge at the intersection between paternalist practices and more democratic possibilities for self-advancement. From Mark Twain's Laura Hawkins in The Gilded Age to the protagonist of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Willa Cather's Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers!, Leverenz finds that the image of the daddy's girl constrains the emerging threat of the career woman even as it articulates the lure of upward mobility for women.
