The Broom Closet: secret meanings of domesticity in postfeminist novels by Louise Erdrich, Mary Gordon, Toni Morrison, Marge Piercy, Jane Smiley, and Amy Tan

The Story

A doctorate-holding editor/columnist at an alternative newsweekly, Cooperman dissects the symbolism of and women's ambivalence toward their domestic roles as depicted in recent culturally diverse US feminist fiction. Conceiving housework as "an art and science of the boundaries," she discusses individual authors, novels, and shared motifs: domesticity as ordering chaos, the unappreciated hollow woman, sustaining home ties, powers of life and death, the sacred in the mundane, and reasons for making a home. Includes a decent categorized bibliography, but no index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A paperback edition from 1999 of The Broom Closet by Jeannette Batz Cooperman. It runs to 239 pages, in very good condition. We hold one copy, so once it is gone it is gone. Shelved under History & Politics. Wrapped with care for collectors and shipped from Kuwait.