That's Women's Work (A History)
How did some kinds of labor in the U.S. – care work, teaching, and domestic chores, for example – come to be seen as properly the concern of women, while other kinds of work, like business careers and scholarly pursuits, became coded masculine? In this episode, listen in to a conversation with Dr. Dan Graff, Director of the Higgins Labor Program at Notre Dame, Professor of History, and teacher of the popular course, “Gender at Work in U.S. History,” to consider where Americans’ idea of gendered “separate spheres” came from and its lasting power.
Experience the Episode
Thursday, February 20, 2025 12:00 pm
How did some kinds of labor in the U.S. – care work, teaching, and domestic chores, for example – come to be seen as properly the concern of women, while other kinds of work, like business careers and scholarly pursuits, became coded masculine? In this episode, listen in to a conversation with Dr. Dan Graff, Director of the Higgins Labor Program at Notre Dame, Professor of History, and teacher of the popular course, “Gender at Work in U.S. History,” to consider where Americans’ idea of gendered “separate spheres” came from and its lasting power.
Women’s Work is sponsored on ThinkND by the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise & Society at the University of Notre Dame and Notre Dame Women Connect.
Join us on Thursday, February 20, 2025.
Meet the Faculty: Daniel Graff
Daniel Graff, Ph.D. has been the director of the Higgins Labor Program since 2014. Dedicated to encouraging the Notre Dame community to realize the centrality of “the labor question” — Who does the work, who gets the fruits, and who makes the rules? — to all human endeavors, Graff has initiated projects like the Labor Cafe, Lunchtime Labor RAPS, HFAN (the Higgins Friends & Alumni Network), and the Just Wage Working Group (with Professor Clemens Sedmak). He also writes and curates original online content, including the Labor Song of the Month, Work of Art/Art of Work, and The Labor Question Today blog.
Graff holds a joint faculty appointment as professor of the practice in the department of history, where he served as director of Undergraduate Studies for fifteen years, winning a 2011 Edmund P. Joyce Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and a 2013 Dockweiler Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising. He offers courses in US labor and nineteenth-century history, including “Labor & America since 1945,” “Abraham Lincoln’s America,” “US Labor History to 1945,” “Food, Work, & Power in American History,” and “Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle against Slavery.”
He has written and published extensively on the histories of work, race, and citizenship in the United States, and his paper at the 2010 Collective Memory in St. Louis Symposium was awarded the Best Paper Prize (“Lovejoy’s Legacies: Race, Religion, and Freedom in St. Louis (and American) Memory”). His current research projects include labor licensing codes of conduct in contemporary American universities; race, labor, and citizenship in nineteenth-century St. Louis; and representations of the chronic crisis facing workers in the US since 1981.
Graff earned his B.A. in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.