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This book asks for the cultural work that spaces of feminine labor do in antebellum texts from a variety of literary and ´para-literary´ contexts. Singling out the kitchen and the factory, it argues that sites of women´s work serve as key textual microcosms in which antebellum culture negotiates the discourses of social difference whose relevance skyrockets in this period, especially the discourses of gender, class, ´race,´ and nationhood. Because of their ostensible marginality on the map of the national imaginary, and because they are associated with social subjects multiply marked as marginal-women of the ´working class´ and slave women-the kitchen and the factory enable the rehearsal of ideas that are difficult to articulate within the core narratives of nationhood: ideas about the forms and meanings of social inequality, and their relationship to the promises of equality that suffuse the nation´s mythology.

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