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Poems by
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Songs of a
Housewife
by Rodger L. Tarr
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this Book now
More than a decade before writing The Yearling and Cross
Creek, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was a young
housewife-journalist living in Rochester, New York. In 1926, the Rochester
Times-Union did a trial run of her column-in-verse, Songs
of a Housewife. To the editor’s surprise, the column
proved immensely popular; over the next two years, Rawlings
published a poem a day, six days a week, and gained a wide
syndication. When she moved to Florida in 1928, however, the
poems were forgotten and--until this collection of roughly half
of them--never reprinted.
In the 250 poems collected here, Rawlings presents homespun
advice on such subjects as the trials and tribulations of being a
cook, mother, friend, relative, and neighbor. She dedicates many
to her favorite subjects: gardening, cooking, pets, and nature.
Throughout, her goal is to entertain, to educate, and to give a
voice to the housewife who sees her role as a creative and
important one. In the process, of course, she also invariably
reveals a great deal about herself, and devoted readers will be
curious to see how the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings they know and
love is evident here, in these early and spirited poems.
Because little is known about Rawlings’s life during this
period, Songs of a Housewife is valuable as commentary
on her evolving attitudes as a woman and as a writer, and many of
the same themes appear in her later works. As a reflection of the
life of a middle-class woman struggling to carve out an
independent and fulfilling role for herself, these poems also
offer a rare insight into the life of women in the late 1920s.
Rodger L. Tarr is University Distinguished
Professor of English at Illinois State University. His most
recent publications are Short Stories of Marjorie Kinnan
Rawlings (UPF, 1994) Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: A
Descriptive Bibliography (1996), and Max and Marjorie:
The Correspondence between Maxwell E. Perkins and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
(UPF, 1999).
1997. 288 pp. 6 X 9.
ISBN 0-8130-1491-3
Cloth, $24.95
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"Six days a week readers found wit and humor and more than a little common sense in her 'Songs of a Housewife'.
Syndicated in more than 50 papers nationwide, she could claim literally thousands of readers for what, by all accounts, was an immensely popular feature."--Library
Journal
"A
fascinating tapestry woven from the lives of women who had won
the right to vote a mere six years earlier. In Songs of a
Housewife, we hear the voice of an emerging feminist, a
voice that stubbornly and--given the political climate of the
1920s--courageously insists that women be respected. Fans of
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings will be surprised and ultimately
delighted by this long overdue collection."--Connie May
Fowler, author of Sugar Cage and Before Women Had
Wings
"Makes available for the first time [the] early work of
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. . . . Reveals themes, attitudes,
phrases, habits of speech . . . and a predilection for irony that
characterizes [her] later work."—Peggy W. Prenshaw,
Louisiana State University
"Rawlings’s poetry is surprisingly good. . . . solid,
traditional poetry about subjects that will never go out of
fashion."—Joel Myerson, University of South Carolina
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