Boris's "Making the Woman Worker" at WHS

The next meeting of the Washington History Seminar, on Monday, November 16 at 4:00 pm ET, will be devoted to Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019, by Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara.  Sonya Michel, University of Maryland, will comment.  Click here to register for the webinar or watch on the National History Center’s Facebook Page or the Wilson Center website.

Amid the unraveling of standard employment at century’s end, previously excluded home-based and domestic workers have pressed the International Labour Organization (ILO) for rights and recognition. By tracing the construction of the woman worker through ILO labor standards, leading feminist historian Eileen Boris probes paths to equality between those classified as men or women and between women globally, complicating the debate over protective labor legislation and questioning whether the new carework economy is just another name for the old dichotomy between “working women” and “mothers in the home.”

 --Dan Ernst

A Symposium on Race, Citizenship and Women's Right to Vote

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The symposium Citizenship and Suffrage: Race, Citizenship, and Women’s Right to Vote on the Nineteenth Amendment’s Centennial, sponsored by the Washington College of Law, American University, will take place online via Zoom on Tuesday, October 6, from 05:00PM - 06:30PM.

The event will describe how citizenship acquisition and citizenship-stripping laws barred women who married noncitizens, as well as women of color generally, from exercising their right to vote even after the 19th Amendment was ratified. Speakers will discuss the history of these laws and then connect these historical events to the challenges to accessing the ballot today.

Panelists include Professor Rose Cuison-Villazor (Rutgers Law School and WCL alum); Professor Kunal Parker (Miami Law School); Celina Stewart (League of Women Voters); Professor Leti Volpp (Berkeley Law School). Professor Amanda Frost (WCL) will moderate.

Du on filiality and falsity in Qing China

Last year, Yue Du (Cornell University) published "Policies and Counterstrategies: State-Sponsored Filiality and False Accusation in Qing China" in the International Journal of Asian Studies 16 (2019), 79-97. Here's the abstract: 

Using court cases culled from various national and local archives in China, this article examines two strategies widely employed by Qing litigants to manipulate state-sponsored filiality to advance their perceived interests in court: “instrumental filicide to lodge a false accusation” and “false accusation of unfiliality.” While Qing subjects were willing and able to exploit the legalized inequality between parent and child for profit-seeking purposes, the Qing imperial state tolerated such maneuvering so as to co-opt local negotiations to reinforce orthodox notions of the parent–child hierarchy in its subjects’ everyday lives. Local actors, who appealed to the Qing legal promotion of parental dominance and filial obedience to empower themselves, were recruited into the Qing state's project of moral penetration and social control, with law functioning as a conduit and instrument that gave the design of “ruling the empire through the principle of filial piety” a concrete legal form in imperial governance.

Further information is available here. 

--Mitra Sharafi

David's "Kinship, Law and Politics"

Joseph E. David, Sapir Academic College, Israel, has published Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging in the Law in Context series of Cambridge University Press:

Why are we so concerned with belonging? In what ways does our belonging constitute our identity? Is belonging a universal concept or a culturally dependent value? How does belonging situate and motivate us? Joseph E. David grapples with these questions through a genealogical analysis of ideas and concepts of belonging. His book transports readers to crucial historical moments in which perceptions of belonging have been formed, transformed, or dismantled. The cases presented here focus on the pivotal role played by belonging in kinship, law, and political order, stretching across cultural and religious contexts from eleventh-century Mediterranean religious legal debates to twentieth-century statist liberalism in Western societies. With his thorough inquiry into diverse discourses of belonging, David pushes past the politics of belonging and forces us to acknowledge just how wide-ranging and fluid notions of belonging can be.

Some endorsements:

'Not since Charles Taylor have scholars seen such a profound inquiry into the sources of selfhood and the nature of belonging in community. Joseph David draws on a stunning range of ancient and modern, familiar and forgotten figures to probe the depths of human nature and our essential bonds of marriage and family, friendship and faith, property and state. This is interdisciplinary and interreligious scholarship of the highest caliber.'

John Witte, Jr. - Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University

'Joseph David’s book is an immensely erudite and deep exploration of the meaning of belonging and identity. David’s brilliant examination of the belonging and identity in their different layers and in diverse historical settings, is of fundamental importance to the understanding of the complexity of the concept and the vital role it plays in contemporary political and cultural life.'

Moshe Halbertal - New York University

--Dan Ernst

Haksgaard on the Homestead Rights of Deserted Wives

Hannah Haksgaard, University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law, has posted The Homesteading Rights of Deserted Wives: A History, which is forthcoming in the Nebraska Law Review:

Mrs. Faro Caudill, Ironing (NYPL)

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the federal government of the United States distributed 270 million acres of land to homesteaders. The federal land-grant legislation allowed single women, but not married women, to partake in homesteading. Existing in a “legal netherworld” between single and married, deserted wives did not have clear rights under the federal legislation, much like deserted wives did not have clear rights in American marital law. During the homesteading period, many deserted wives litigated claims in front of the Department of the Interior, arguing they had the right to homestead. This is the first article to collect and analyze the administrative decisions regarding the homesteading rights of deserted wives, offering a unique view of American marriage. After documenting the history of homesteading rights of deserted wives, this Article explores how these unique administrative decisions adopted or rejected the prevailing marital norms in America and how understanding these administrative decisions can aid in our understanding of marriage in American history.

–Dan Ernst