Sarah Gordon – författare

Through home sewing, Sarah A. Gordon examines domestic labor, marketing practices, changing standards of femininity, and understandings of class, gender, and race from 1890 to 1930. As ready-made garments became increasingly available due to industrialization, many women, out of necessity or choice, continued to make their own clothing. In doing so, women used a customary female skill both as a means of supporting traditional ideas and as a tool of personal agency. The shifting meanings of sewing formed a contested space in which businesses promoted sewing machines as tools for maintaining domestic harmony, women interpreted patterns to suit-or flout-definitions of appropriate appearances, and girls were taught to sew in ways that reflected beliefs about class, race, and region. Unlike studies of clothing that focus on changes in fashion, "Make it Yourself" looks at the social and cultural processes surrounding home production. Gordon examines sewing clothing as work, whether resented or enjoyed, and the function of that work for families and individuals from a range of backgrounds.Another unique element is Gordon's use of an unusually wide variety of source materials, from diaries, photographs, and government pamphlets to tissue paper patterns, dresses, sewing workbooks, and paper dolls. This "hands on" approach, combined with an accessible writing style, connects the reader to the women and girls who are at the heart of her study. Altogether, "Make it Yourself" provides a new perspective on a widespread yet often neglected form of women's work.

Disturbing, ironic, haunting, brutal. What inner struggles led Flannery O’Connor to create fiction that elicits such labels? Much of the tension that drives O’Connor’s writing, says Sarah Gordon, stems from the natural resistance of her imagination to the obedience expected by her male-centered church, society, and literary background.Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination shows us a writer whose world was steeped in male presumption regarding women and creativity. The book is filled with fresh perspectives on O’Connor’s Catholicism; her upbringing as a dutiful, upper-class southern daughter; her readings of Thurber, Poe, Eliot, and other arguably misogynistic authors; and her schooling in the New Criticism.As Gordon leads us through a world premised on expectations at odds with O’Connor’s strong and original imagination, she ranges across all of O’Connor’s fiction and many of her letters and essays. While acknowledging O’Connor’s singular situation, Gordon also gleans insights from the lives and works of other southern writers, Eudora Welty, Caroline Gordon, and Margaret Mitchell among them.Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination draws on Sarah Gordon’s thirty years of reading, teaching, and discussing one of our most complex and influential authors. It takes us closer than we have ever been to the creative struggles behind such literary masterpieces as Wise Blood and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature focuses on the intersection of food and humor across several medieval narrative genres. This book is a part of the Purdue Studies in Romance Literature Series.