Seeking a third panelist for civil rights labor activism or women of color labor resistance in broad U.S. (includes colonies and military bases)

[aimee.l...@uconn.edu]

We have a panelist presenting on African-American women using labor organizing and the EEOC to challenge work conditions, particularly in retail.  And a second panelist presenting on Puerto Rican women's labor organizing on the island and in New York.

If you have a paper on any topic related to women's labor resistance, organizing, or union leadership, please let us know.

We already have a commentator arranged as well.

[bartkowsk...@gmail.com]

Hello, 

My name is Lindsay Bartkowski and I am a PhD candidate at Temple University in the English department. My dissertation project assembles a genealogical history of the concept of service labor in the U.S., beginning in the antebellum period when domestic workers began to receive a wage and the figure of the "housewife" emerged, and ending in the contemporary period with the expansion of the service sector and gig economy. I focus on literary and cultural texts that both established and resisted the feminization and racialization of service labor, in order to trace the heterogeneous meanings of women's labor, and challenge contemporary assumptions about what counts as work.

For this panel, I would like to offer a presentation on the Household Technicians of America (HTA), an organized national movement of African American domestic workers in the 1960s and 70s. I am interested in how the rhetoric and strategies of the HTA intersect with white feminist discourses of the period exemplified by Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique (1963), which also had an interest in revising the social value of housework. I will analyze how each of these movements interprets and deploys the discourse of domesticity to resist patriarchal institutions. Together, these movements compel us to consider how a discourse ostensibly designed to restrict women's mobility and social power can be radically revised to articulate visions of freedom and empowerment.

Please let me know if you need any further information as you assemble your panel! 

Thanks and all the best,

Lindsay

bartkowsk...@gmail.com

[aimee.l...@uconn.edu]

Hi, we have our full roundtable and chair/commentator.  Thanks!