Modernism, Leftism, and the Spirit: The Poetry of Lola Ridge

This article puts early modern poetry by women in dialogue with economic theory and thus opens unacknowledged intersections for discussion. In looking at the early poetry of Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore in relation to economics, it is important to recognize not only that economic theory mattered to a wide public in the early years of the twentieth century but that the economic field was itself a gendered site of contention as it transitioned into a centrally defining system of modernity. Not only did these three poets circulate in the same avant-garde crowds in New York during the late teens and publish in many of the same little magazines, they also shared feminist sentiments concurrent with the first-wave movement, including challenges to male-dominated economies and institutions. Within their work, economic arrangements of gender are not only challenged but connected to modern ideas of value, work, desire, and need; subsequently, the tension between an economy of consumption and an economy of social provisioning finds expression in a distinctively feminist poetics concerned with capitalism's degradation of both work and human need.

show abstract

Portraits of Working Women: Lola Ridge’s “The Ghetto” and the Visual Record

Kinnahan

2022

Humanities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This essay focuses on Lola Ridge’s long poem “The Ghetto” in relation to the gendered imagery and visual construction of the modern laborer emerging across early twentieth-century print media. Perpetuating gendered notions of the modern worker as predominately masculine, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual representations of the laborer typically feature manly, virile figures, often in resistance to capitalism and inevitably eliding the industrial woman laborer. Ridge’s “The Ghetto” alternatively locates modern labor in the female industrial worker. The essay considers the poem’s splicing of collective and individual portraits of immigrant working women, developing a visual rhetoric that asserts women’s agency amidst modernity’s changing forms of work, insisting upon their visibility as workers, activists, and feminists. Consideration of several visual print genres includes women’s labor publications; social and industrial documentary photography; and periodical illustrations from The Masses. In visually representing women workers, these sources of visual media contextualize Ridge’s approach in “The Ghetto” and social attitudes toward gender and labor persisting in the century’s early years.

show abstract

Modernism, Leftism, and the Spirit: The Poetry of Lola Ridge

Cited by 3 publications

References 3 publications

Poet, Editor, Anarchist: Lola Ridge’s New York Networks

Poet, Editor, Anarchist: Lola Ridge’s New York Networks

Economics and Gender in Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore

Portraits of Working Women: Lola Ridge’s “The Ghetto” and the Visual Record

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About