Work Summary

Ms. Kennedy opens this section with a bit of history about working American women. She contrasts working women in the upper half of the socioeconomic scale with women in the lower half who work; In the case of the latter, these women are often "the primary breadwinners in a majority of households and often struggle to support a family alone." Even for those women with professional careers, pay for women still averages 25 percent lower than the same work performed by men, she asserts. She notes that women poets often support social causes such as child labor laws, at school, at work and at home. Equal opportunity and equal wages for equal work are now the touchstone of American workplace. Although, Kennedy says, it is very difficult to find any contemporary poetry about women at work, no modern-day "Rosie the Riveter."

Gwendolyn Brooks gives...