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.”
Panelists:
Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara
Sonya Michel, University of Maryland
Eileen Boris is the Hull Chair and Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies and History, the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her books include Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States, winner of the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History; Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State, co-authored with Jennifer Klein, winner of the Sara A. Whaley Prize on Women and Work; and, most recently, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019. Boris is President of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History.
Sonya Michel is a professor emerita of History, American Studies and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. With a PhD from Brown University, she was a founding editor of the journal Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, and she has written widely on women, gender and social policy. Among her books are Children's Interests/Mothers' Rights: The Shaping of America's Child Care Policy (Yale UP, 1999); and Reassembling Motherhood: Procreation and Care in a Globalized World (Columbia UP 2017), co-edited with Yasmine Ergas and Jane Jenson. Since retirement, Sonya Michel has become an artist; she is currently a member of Touchstone Gallery in Washington, DC. And she is continuing to address issues of gender and social policy through her journalism.
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