Feminism and Work in Edna Ferber's “Sisters Under Their Skin”

Edna Ferber's short story “Sisters Under Their Skin” deserves a new reading in the context of the gender politics of the 1910s. The story dramatizes an intra-movement struggle in first-wave feminism between what some perceived as a Victorian ethos of moral uplift and a more modern emphasis on women's economic equality and professional dignity. Although some critics argue Ferber ignores contemporary labor unrest in her depiction of harmony among women workers, this study asserts that Ferber is attuned to this context, offering a utopian antidote to the oppressive, inhumane working conditions that sparked these protests. Nevertheless, Ferber is limited by not only her own world-view but the expectations of a middlebrow readership as well; her appeal to their ideas about individualism and the American dream hinders her from offering a truly radical alternative to not only nineteenth-century suffragism but to Progressive Era politics as well.