Women in labor

Take that any way you want. Just finished May Sarton's excellent but excruciating novel, The Small Room, about women academics and the labors of bringing young female minds to the intellectual life.

Thanks, Marq. I enjoy googling WPA worker posters. Lots of depictions of women in all kinds of work there. The Library of Congress has a page devoted to WPA posters here:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaposters/about.html

I saw the title and thought you were talking about books in which women give birth! I was wracking my brain to come up with one!

4: Anna Karenina

Interesting article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/mar/03/fiction-life-childbirth

3: That's a good site nohrt4me2. (Unfortunately the posters I linked above have been deleted).

Having started researching New Zealand labour history, early 1900s, for a novel, I'm now fascinated with it. Easily the most interesting woman involved was Ettie Rout. Her training as a stenographer gave her entree to all manner of groups, from revolutionary unionists to government investigations and the courts. She wrote and edited newspapers for unionists. She also taught and mentored women in both stenography and activism.

From Christchurch, she organised a Voluntary Aid Detachment at the start of the Great War, that served in Egypt in the aftermath of the slaughter at Gallipoli. She also set up a group of women volunteers in France to educate the ANZAC troops about venereal disease and made herself notorious by passing out condoms to the arriving forces. To doctors she was "the guardian angel of the ANZACs," while clerics and NZ mothers called her "the wickedest woman on earth" and "an agent of the Devil." The French gave her a medal, while the NZ parliament passed a law that made mentioning her name a criminal offence with a fine of a hundred pounds.

Although she's mentioned in a great many sources, Ettie: A Life of Ettie Rout by Jane Tolerton (Penguin, 1992) is a good introduction to a protean character.