Join the Department of History and April Haynes, University of Wisconsin - Madison, for a talk on "They Know their Value and Take Advantage of It: Household Workers' Organizing at the Dawn of an American Service Economy."

In this talk, Haynes traces the simultaneous emergence of a waged service sector and the first stirrings of today's domestic workers' movement in the early US republic. Both trends are documented through the rise and fall of female intelligence offices, employment agencies which placed wage workers in employers' households across the North and West. The number of these offices exploded as demand for paid service rose in the era of northern abolition and the "pastoralization" of married women's housework. Drawing on data on 700 intelligence offices that operated between 1750 and 1850, Haynes finds that Black and female "intelligencers" kept a significant proportion of all offices beginning in the 1810s and that service workers increasingly used these spaces for mutual aid and proto-unionization. By midcentury, employer-class women regained the upper hand in domestic labor negotiations by launching a reform crusade that represented working-class female intelligence offices as sites of sex trafficking, demanding license laws, and organizing employer-run labor brokerages. Their actions both contributed to and obscured the racialization of domestic service, ultimately giving rise to the late nineteenth-century panic over "white slavery." Haynes argues that the class conflict over who could sell domestic labor power reveals its value within the development of American capitalism.

Haynes is professor and director of diversity, equity and inclusion in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research priorities include racialized gender, intimate labor, and women in social movements. Her first book, Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-century America, unearths the surprising origins of a sex panic that prepared many Americans to accept heteronormativity. Her most recent article recovers the earliest known movement for sex workers' rights in US history and was published by Gender & History this fall. Her work has been recognized with awards from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. 

The Department of History Seminar Series runs throughout the academic year and features guest speakers from the top universities who share their perspectives on history. Visit history.uoregon.edu for more information about the seminar series.