Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace

When President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009, poets Carolyne Wright and Eugenia Toledo felt the need to hear from women about their workplace experiences - not just pay and promotion inequity, sexual harassment, and intimidation - but the increasing range of women’s occupations and options in a globalized world. Wright and Toledo, along with coeditor M. L. Lyons, have brought together voices of women poets in the workspaces they occupy: from cotton rows to corner suites, trawlers to typing pools, nursing stations to space stations, factory floors to faculty offices. These voices, American as well as international, bear witness to women’s workplace lives, and act to re-envision and refigure the world of work for women.