Education as Liberation: The Case of Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers

Abstract

Anzia Yezierska's 1925 novel, Bread Givers, has generally been read as the chronicle of a young woman's struggle to free herself from the repressive power structure of Jewish immigrant society. This freedom, however, can be more accurately read as a movement from a repressive ideological matrix dominated by the church into a nonrepressive ideological matrix dominated by the schools. This historical shift is encoded as a movement from slavery toward freedom by Yezierska herself, due largely to her uncritical adherence to Progressive educational ideology as articulated by John Dewey and his followers. Yezierska's novel, like Deweyian Progressiv-ism, foregrounds the contradiction between traditional educational practice and life in modern, urbanized America. And like Progressivism, Bread Givers offers an imaginary resolution to this historical contradiction because it never seriously questions the inegalitarian structures of economic life that render education's egalitarian promise unrealizable.