Lara Vapnek

Lara Vapnek specializes in the history of gender and labor in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Her forthcoming book, Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920 (2009), examines wage-earning women's efforts to assert new, independent identities as workers and as citizens. Vapnek is currently investigating educated women's use of science to claim social authority and promote full human development. She teaches history at St. John's University, in Queens, New York.

Lecture topics:

• "City Slave Girls": Gender and the Labor Question in the Gilded-Age United States
• Solving the Servant Problem: Domestic Service and Labor Reform during the Progressive Era
• Workers, Reformers, and the Contested Meanings of Protection for Wage-Earning Women
• Mary Putnam Jacobi and Professional Women's Quest for Independence

Viewed Saturday, November 21, 2009