The Roots of Gendered Labor: Women and Work in American History

This class will explore the long, tangled history of women's labor in North America. Beginning with gendered labor practices among Native Americans, West Africans, and Europeans in the seventeenth century, this class will proceed thematically and chronologically through the early twentieth century. We will consider the deep roots of gendered labor in American history, asking how categories of race and class, freedom and enslavement, and immigration status have structured female labor. We will also examine the ways in which social transformations such as industrialization and urbanization, as well as changes in the economic, political, and sexual order shaped the experiences of laboring women. Reading secondary sources alongside a rich array of primary sources, including images and songs, we will consider the deep continuities and wrenching changes in the meanings of women's work over time.