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

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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.

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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

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