Lara Vapnek Lara Vapnek specializes in the history of gender and labor in the nineteenth and twentieth-century United States. Her recent book, Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920 (University of Illinois Press, 2009) shows how female wage earners women pursued equality by claiming new identities as citizens and as workers. Vapnek’s current project examines the intersections between motherhood, social class, and state formation, arguing that debates about infant feeding set the parameters of state responsibility for public health and redefined human rights. She teaches history at St. John’s University, in Queens, New York.
Lecture Topics
- Breadwinners: Working Women in the Early Struggle for Gender Equality
- Guarding the Girl in the Shop: Gender and Class in the Gilded Age Consumers’ Movement
- Solving the Servant Problem: Domestic Service and Labor Reform during the Progressive Era
Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920
Recasting the meaning of women’s work in the early fight for gender equality
Lara Vapnek tells the story of American labor feminism from the end of the Civil War through the winning of woman suffrage. During this period, working women in the nation’s industrializing cities launched a series of campaigns to gain economic equality and political power. This book shows how working women pursued equality by claiming new identities as citizens and as breadwinners.
Analyzing disjunctions between middle-class and working-class women’s ideas of independence, Vapnek highlights the agendas for change advanced by leaders such as Jennie Collins, Leonora O’Reilly, and Helen Campbell, and organizations such as the National Consumers’ League, the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, and the Women’s Trade Union League. Locating households as important sites of class conflict, Breadwinners recovers the class and gender politics behind the marginalization of domestic workers from labor reform while documenting the ways in which working-class women raised their voices on their own behalf. To order a copy of Breadwinners, click here: Breadwinners
Reviewer’s Comments
“This work is the best history we have of the class tension between elite women reformers and wage-earning women. Vapnek adds a strong, new perspective to interpretive debates over the meaning of dependence, independence, protections, rights, and citizenship.”–Eileen Boris, Hull Professor and Chair, Department of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
“A stirring account of the independent spirit that led women to seek self-reliance in the labor market. Lara Vapnek lucidly illustrates how a group of courageous women rejected poorly paid work and domestic service jobs to gain financial autonomy and the right to vote. This book adds a significant dimension to our understanding of the lives and aspirations of women of all classes.”–Alice Kessler-Harris, author of Gendering Labor History
“So far, the struggles of nineteenth-century women seeking independence through paid work has largely focused on the middle class. Lara Vapnek’s attention to the efforts of working class women to escape the dependence of domestic work fills in a huge gap in this engrossing story.”–Susan Armitage, coeditor of Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West