HIST 421 - Topics in Historiography

Gender and Labor in the U.S.
This course examines classic and recent historiography on gender and labor in the U.S., with a focus on continuity and change in women’s unwaged and waged labor from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. We will study how enslaved black women’s labor, and free women’s unpaid household work, sustained their families and shaped nineteenth-century capitalism. We will examine how gendered and racial conventions and familial obligations kept most female wage-earners in agriculture, domestic service, and sex-typed and segregated factory jobs. Educated single women trained for feminized professions (teaching, nursing, and clerical work) but were routinely fired if they married. While women’s labor sustained families during the Depression and helped win World War II, government jobs programs and postwar entitlements mainly benefited heterosexual family men. Single workers, straight and queer, found new ways to make their livings. Married women with children remained in the paid workforce throughout the postwar period; their number steadily increased through the end of the century, yet they remained underpaid and concentrated in feminized jobs. While wage-earning mothers became the norm, the ideal and symbol of the male breadwinner persisted. Labor historians have covered all of these topics, and more-we shall do so as well.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Two history courses at Reed, one of which must be at the 300 level
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken up to 2 times for credit if different topics.
Notes: Not all topics offered every year. Review schedule of classes for availability.
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.