Professor Premilla Nadasen is an associate professor of history at Queens College (City University of New York). She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1999 and her B.A. from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation on the welfare rights movement was nominated for the Bancroft Award. Her book, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (Routledge 2005), outlines the ways in which African American women on welfare forged a feminism of their own out of the political and cultural circumstances of the late 1960s and 1970s.
Public Lecture: Thursday, November 17 | 3:30-5pm | Koffolt Labs 207
Household Worker Organizing: Feminism, Race, and the Politics of Care Work
In the 1970s African American domestic workers developed a nationwide movement that organized in public spaces, pushed to revalue the labor that took place in the home, fostered alliances with employers, and demanded state-based protections. In making their claim for “pay, professionalism and respect” they rejected the language of care and instead framed their work in terms of rights, suggesting that regardless of the kind of work they performed they were entitled to the same protections as other workers.
Faculty & Graduate Seminar: Friday, November 18 | 11:30am | 386 University Hall, AAAS conference room
Seminar readings will be available closer to the seminar.
