September 26, 2008—Back to the Future: Mapping Women Workers Across the Global South
Mary Frederickson, Miami University of Ohio
Commentator: Susan Levine, University of Illinois at Chicago

This work grows out of my interest in the history of women in the U.S.South and new questions about capitalist expansion that emerged as I traveled across the Silk Road in 2006. I argue here that women workers in the contemporary Global South live and work within a model of industrial development that materialized in the red brick mills of the “New South” in the early 20th century. As industrialization transforms life around the world in the 21st century, women throughout the Global South are implementing survival strategies shared by earlier generations of workers in the U.S. South.

October 17, 2008—Clothes Make the Man: Cross-Dressing and the Law in Early Modern Spain
Jack Norton, University of Illinois at Chicago
Commentator: Valentina Tikoff, DePaul University

Cross-dressing has a long and significant history in Europe, with both real and fictional women taking on male personas to suit their needs. Using a comparative early modern european framework, this paper assesses how Spanish law addressed female cross-dressing. By studying both the law and legal commentaries, I hope to explain how cross-dressing both aided and thwarted women's economic advancement.

November 7, 2008—Housewives, Citizenship, and Feminism in Postwar America
The Value of Housework, Queer Competition, and the Defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, 1978-1982
Alison Lefkovitz, University of Chicago

This paper argues that ERA proponents believed women’s inequality could only be fully shattered by compensating wives for their unpaid labor as homemakers. The conservative movement disavowed this strategy and argued that granting entitlements to homemakers would transform the vast majority of families into matriarchies or welfare families. The ERA would simultaneously grant gay couples the right to marry and thereby create another perverse alternative to the “traditional” family. The Right interpreted women’s equality as offering a world where all families were equally deviant, a cost many Americans agreed was too high to pay for formal gender equality.

“A Golden Apple Filled With Acid”: The Political Citizenship of Working-Class Housewives and the Campaign to Defeat the Equal Rights Amendment in Post-World War II America
Emily LaBarbera Twaróg, University of Illinois at Chicago
Commentator: Lynn Weiner, Roosevelt University

December 5, 2008—Hull-House After Jane Addams
Bowen Country Club: The Intersection of Women’s Space, Nature, and Visions of Childhood
Barbara Dobschuetz, Independent Scholar
Revisiting the Social Settlement as Women’s Space: Hull-House’s First Twenty Years and Beyond, 1889–1961
Rima Lunin Schultz, Independent Scholar
Commentator: Anne Meis Knupfer, Purdue University

January 16, 2009—Against Doctors’ Orders: Lesbian Motherhood and the Battle for Medical Authority in the 1970s
Catherine Batza, University of Illinois at Chicago
Commentator: Lane Fenrich, Northwestern University

February 20, 2009—When Women’s Rights Activists Embraced Darwin: the Evolutionary Feminism of Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Kimberly Hamlin, Miami University of Ohio
Commentator: Genevieve McBride, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee

March 20, 2009—Indian Women’s Captivity Narratives: An Exercise in Historical Inversion
Andrea Robertson Cremer, Macalester College
Commentator: Dawn G. Marsh, Purdue University

April 24, 2009—Vara Majette’s Sexual Awakening: Race and Sexual Freedom in Southern Pulp Fiction
Leslie Dunlap, Willamette University
Commentator: Sandra Frink, Roosevelt University

May 15, 2009—“The Dove Has Claws”: Anticruelty Reform and Masculine Sentimentalism in Gilded Age America
Susan Pearson, Northwestern University
Commentator: Timothy Gilfoyle, Loyola University Chicago

We will pre-circulate papers to those planning to attend. If you cannot attend and want to read a paper, please contact the author directly. E-mail scholl[at]newberry.org,or call (312) 255-3524 to receive a copy of the paper. Papers are available for request two weeks prior to the seminar date. Please include your e-mail address in all correspondence.

Please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend the seminar

2007-2008

Scholl Center Home