“A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place”: Reading Minimalism, Place, and Gender from Anzia Yezierska to Marie Kondo

Abstract

When I was a girl in the 1980s, my mother transitioned from domestic work cleaning houses to a white-collar job at an electric company. Once she had fulltime work, my grandparents stepped in to help keep our household in order. Grandma did laundry, washed dishes, and exhorted my brother, sister, and me (well, mostly me) to clean our rooms, with the saying: “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” That phrase stood out when I encountered it years later in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925). Like much of Yezierska’s work, the book is semi-autobiographical, a coming-of-age tale that chronicles the transformation of an immigrant girl who seeks to “make herself a person” by becoming a schoolteacher and joining the ranks of the middle class. In her stories, novels, and nonfiction, Yezierska shows how working-class women who assimilate into the dominant culture negotiate the physical spaces they inhabit as part of that transformation. Some of her characters do this by embarking on home improvement in their tenement dwellings while others, such as Sara Smolinsky in Bread Givers, leave the tenements for modern,