AHA Session 154
Coordinating Council for Women in History 9
Labor and Working-Class History Association 8
Coordinating Council for Women in History 9
Labor and Working-Class History Association 8
Friday, January 5, 2024: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Yosemite C (Hilton Union Square, Ballroom)
Chair:
Lisa Levenstein, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Panel:
Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Stanford University
H. Yumi Kim, Johns Hopkins University
Lisa Levenstein, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Matthew H. Sommer, Stanford University
H. Yumi Kim, Johns Hopkins University
Lisa Levenstein, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Matthew H. Sommer, Stanford University
Session Abstract
Reproductive labor – childbearing, caregiving, and other “invisible” and uncompensated or undercompensated work in the domestic realm – has long been an important theme in social and economic history. Scholars have examined changing cultures and conceptions of care; the racialization and gendering of domestic labor; how the influence of economic regimes such as capitalism and socialism have affected care work; the histories of caregivers, free and enslaved; and the ways in which this category of labor has been theorized and excluded from ideas of productivity. But in the past few years, reproductive labor has also emerged as an increasingly urgent issue within the lives of many historians. During the acute phase of the COVID pandemic, many institutions and networks that offered care were profoundly disrupted, and scholars found themselves trying to merge academic labor with domestic labor in new, often inequitable and unsustainable, ways. Meanwhile, the overturning of Roe vs Wade made coerced reproductive labor a distinct and uncomfortable possibility for a larger population of contemporary Americans.
In this roundtable, historians who work on reproductive labor around the world examine the issue from a number of angles: personal, scholarly, and political.
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