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Shop Girls to Show Girls

Teaching Resources on New York’s Working Class for Community College Students

About this Guide

This is a companion guide the NEH funded project, Shop Girls to Show Girls: Teaching Resources to New York's Working Class for Community College Students. The resources on this guide either directly or thematically support the subject of working class life and how it intersects with gender, race and ethnicity.

How to use this guide: 
If you are inspired by Open Access lesson plans featured on the Shop Girls to Show Girls site, please note that many of the resources on this guide belong to the print and digital collections of the Gladys Marcus Library and may be under copyright. Other resources that are free, Open Access or in the Public Domain resource will be marked as such.

 

Highlights from our book collection

Famine and Fashion

Famine and Fashion is of intereest to anyone studying images of work in the nineteenth century, popular and canonical nineteenth-century literature, the history of women's work, the history of sweated labor, the origins of the ready-made clothing industry and early feminism.

Book Cover

Consuming Fantasies

In Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920, Lise Shapiro Sanders examines the cultural significance of the shopgirl-both historical figure and fictional heroine-from the end of Queen Victoria's reign through the First World War. 

Charm: The Career Girl's Guide to Business and Personal Success

This book can be utilized as a primary source on gender expectations for women enter the workforce in the 1960s.

(Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love

Brooke Erin Duffy draws much-needed attention to the gap between the handful who find lucrative careers and the rest, whose "passion projects" amount to free work for corporate brands and connects the activities of these women to larger shifts in unpaid and gendered labor, offering a lens through which to understand, anticipate, and critique broader transformations in the creative economy. 

Pink Collar Workers

Writen in the late 1970s this book provides a comprehensive study of the life experiences of women in all areas of the labor force is based on firsthand observations over a period of three years.

Domestica

In this enlightening and timely work, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo highlights the voices, experiences, and views of Mexican and Central American women who care for other people's children and homes, as well as the outlooks of the women who employ them in Los Angeles. The new preface looks at the current issues facing immigrant domestic workers in a global context.

Have a question or comment about these guides? Contact: libraryreference@fitnyc.edu