Feb 5
Lecture by Dr. April Haynes
They Know their Value and Take Advantage of It’: Intimate Labor Movements in the early United States
This lecture explores the emergence of household and sex workers' movements in the early US republic. April Haynes contends that the development of American capitalism depended on intimate labor — the work of caring for bodies, homes, and emotions. Most of this work had historically been performed without pay within patriarchal and enslaving households. The gradual abolition of northern slavery and white workers' increasing mobility transformed domestic service into a massive segment of the wage-earning workforce. Paid housework grew increasingly stratified by race and ethnicity, with generational outcomes that challenged the wage as a free-labor panacea. At the same time, the rise of sexual commerce in northern cities afforded poor women an alternative to low-waged housework in other peoples' homes. Far from a "secondary" or "informal" sector, this spectrum of intimate labor was widely understood as integral to political economy. So, when household employers, local governments, and institutional officers manipulated intimate labor markets to serve their interests, the nation's most vulnerable wage workers organized to control the direction of their own lives and livelihoods. Haynes interprets their activism as the vanguard of the early US labor movement.