Eileen Boris

Eileen Boris

Hull Professor

Specialization

Labor Studies, Gender, Race, Class, Women's History, Social Politics

Education

1981 Ph.D. Brown University (American Civilization)

1974 M.A. Brown University (American Civilization)

1970 B.A. Boston University, College of Liberal Arts, Summa Cum Laude with Distinction (English Language and Literature and American History and Civilization)

Bio

Areas of study:

  • gender, race, and class;
  • feminist theory;
  • labor studies;
  • social politics;
  • women, work, and welfare;
  • women's and gender history

 

Statement:

I came of age with the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Growing up disadvantaged compared to wealthy neighbors, I identified not with my “betters” but with the civil rights movement. I was there during the Viet Nam war when police invaded Marsh Chapel at Boston University to arrest an AWOL soldier, when Bill Baird challenged the law by handing out contraceptives to unmarried students, when African Americans organized against police brutality, and when thousands of women in 1970 declared our liberation while marching to commemorate the winning of suffrage fifty years before.

Finding traditional academic boundaries too artificial, I trained as an interdisciplinary historian in American Studies and my professors were open to making the study of women my major field. While a graduate student, I was part of a collective that developed the first women's studies class at Brown. In the mid-1970s, I taught women in the modern world at a time when we had to xexox books written by earlier generations of feminists, going back to the mid-19th century. I started to focus on women workers when, as part of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, I created a slide show illustrating the struggles of women wage earners and helped launch the film, “Union Maids.” I learned as much from active engagement in current struggles as I did from my classes.

I like to joke that I have only two topics, home and work, and they are the same. My first book on the arts and crafts movement of the early 20th century considered the social meaning of design and ended up asking, what is work and who is a worker? Gender and the state moved to the center of my subsequent book on the politics of industrial homework, which received the 1995 Philip Taft Prize in Labor History. In addressing the “problem” of the wage-earning mother, I challenged the division of home from work, private from public that the existence of paid labor in the home denies. Going to India as part of a consultation sponsored by the International Labor Organization and the Ford Foundation on home-based labor really shifted my analysis, as did meeting the activists who created the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and who confronted the global politics of women and development in their daily work. I subsequently co-edited a collection on homework around the globe as an intervention into ongoing debates over globalization and as an expression of transnational feminist praxis. Teaching in Finland, Japan, and Australia also provided new lenses from which to view the United States.

Gender was fundamental to the shaping of state policy, but so too was race. In college, I worked as an intern for the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination but, more to my liking, as part of grass-roots efforts to empower those who lived in public housing and sought economic, political, and social justice. For fourteen years, I had the privilege of teaching at Howard University, the nation’s premier HBU (Historically Black University) where I gained as much, if not more, from my students than I gave them. In a series of articles, and a book in progress, I have interrogated the provision of citizenship rights through employment in the United States to explore how social policy reflects and shapes racialized gender. As part of the effort to block punitive welfare reform in the mid 1990s, I was part of the Women’s Committee of 100 for Welfare Justice and began investigating the history of welfare rights.

My project on the how home care workers, mostly women of color, became the new face of the labor movement brings together many of these concerns: the home as workplace, the valuing of women’s labors, the connection between public and private, the ways that state policy reinforces inequality, and the failure of welfare reform. I’ve been able to combine scholarship with activism in working with trade unionists, disability rights activists, senior advocates, and others to improve in-home care. I’ve engaged in participatory action research as part of the Women’s Economic Justice Project in our region. My new project considers the making of the woman worker as a distinct kind of worker through a history of the International Labor Organization. I look at various labor conventions and discourses of protection, equality, development, gender, and decent work over the last century from its founding in 1919.

After a stint at the University of Virginia in Studies in Women and Gender, I came to UCSB in 2001. UCSB has offered interdisciplinary focus, commitment to gender and ethnic studies, and an environment for doing scholarship that matters. It is an honor and a responsibility to hold the Hull Chair.

 

Hull Endowed Chair:

As an expression of his commitment to UC Santa Barbara and women's rights, in 1998 UCSB Foundation Trustee M. Blair Hull ('65) endowed a chair in the then Women's Studies Program. The endowment supports the teaching and research activities of a distinguished interdisciplinary scholar who is working to advance the understanding of women, gender, and social justice. The Hull Chair is the first endowed chair in the field at the University of California.