A Study Guide for Julia Alvarez's "Women's Work"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Julia Alvarez's "Women's Work," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535843324

Book preview

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Woman's Work

Julia Alvarez

1984

Introduction

Julia Alvarez's poem Woman's Work was first published as part of her collection Homecoming in 1984. Woman's Work is included in the section Housekeeping, which contains poems titled How I Learned to Sweep, Washing the Windows, and Dusting, among others. All of the poems in this part of the book have deceptively simple titles, but they are about more than just household chores. Woman's Work expresses a girl's frustration at being forced to help her mother with meticulous housekeeping but ends with a healthy dose of perspective. The girl, now a mature woman looking back, reaches some understanding of her mother's zealous attention to chores and realizes that she herself is equally particular and focused when it comes to her own art, her writing.

Author Biography

Alvarez was born on March 27, 1950, in New York City. After her birth, her family returned to their home in the Dominican Republic, where they stayed until Alvarez was ten years old. Her father was forced to leave the country in 1960 as a political exile after opposing the Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo, who was infamous for having his opponents murdered. The family settled once again in New York.

Alvarez spoke English, but only what she referred to in an interview with Juanita Heredia in 2000 as classroom, blackboard, verb drill English. She struggled to understand her American classmates' accents and rapid speech, and she credits this adjustment with helping to form her as a writer. I learned to pay attention, she explained to Heredia; "I became very interested in words, the little weights and measures of each word…. I think you have to do that with your own language when you