Dear RSF:

Please join us next Wednesday, June 8th at 11:00 for Visiting Scholar Kirsten Swinth’s presentation, “Inventing the ‘Working Family’ in the 1980s.”

Swinth is Professor of History and American Studies at Fordham University where she has been since 1997, previously serving as both American Studies Program Director (2002-2007) and History Department Chair (2012-2016). Her most recent monograph was Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family (Harvard University Press, 2018).

At RSF, Swinth is researching and writing the first history of the contemporary American “working family.” She plans to demonstrate how a surge in mothers’ paid labor since 1970 provoked a deep cultural crisis as it disrupted the long-held norm of a male breadwinner and female homemaker. Swinth is exploring how this major reordering of social relations forged a new normative family ideal even as gender and racial inequalities persisted and many challenged the new model. She is also investigating how the media, social scientists, and politicians helped shape this new ideal.