FLAGSTAFF — In honor of Women’s History Month, the Department of History is sponsoring Jennifer Klein, Durfee Professor of history at Yale University, who will speak on “Women, Work, and Welfare: A History of Gender and Precarious Labor” at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, March 23, NAU Campus, Liberal Arts building, room 120.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Commission on the Status of Women, the Department of Sociology, the Department of Social Work, and the Department of Women and Gender Studies.
Klein’s talk will offer a historical discussion of women’s precarious labor in the U.S., spotlighting the gendered development of urban wage work from the mid-19th century to the era of Uber and TaskRabbit.
Dr. Klein is the author of Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2012), which was awarded the Sara A. Whaley book prize from the National Women’s Studies Association; For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton, 2003), which was awarded the Ellis W. Hawley Prize in Political History/Political Economy from the Organization of American Historians; and The Hagley Prize in Business History from the Business History Conference.
In 2014, the Hans Sigrist Foundation at the University of Bern in Switzerland awarded Dr. Klein the prestigious 2014 Hans Sigrist Prize for her contribution to the field of Women and Precarity: Historical Perspectives.
“Professor Klein’s research on the history and development of social security in the U.S.A., as well as her research on the history of care work, brilliantly combines social, economic, political and gender history. By applying a multi-perspective approach…Jennifer Klein has rewritten the history of the social state.”
– Hans Sigrist Foundation
Klein’s work is highly relevant to the residents of Flagstaff, as it centers on the politics of care work, gender and social policy, and the history of health and welfare in the United States, all of which affect our lives on a daily basis. Concerns surrounding the precarity of work have been front and center since the pandemic and the uneven impact it incurred on women and marginalized communities in the labor force, anchoring this historical perspective in the contemporary experience of the labor force.