Alice Kessler-Harris, Columbia University: Trapped in the Past? A Historical View of American Workplace Policies
The following are my notes from Kessler-Harris 's keynote address at the Redesigning, Redefining Work Summit at Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research , November 7, 2013. This address was conducted in a question-and-answer format. Questions are in bold italics, answers are in regular font. How has the U.S. workplace been imagined over time? For most of history, work was imagined as part of the household - work and the household were all tied together. Women pitched in, men pitched in, and this union was indivisible though most of the 19th century for most households. In the 1960s -- in the space of a single lifetime -- we have gone through a revolution in work, reimagining it as something far away from the household. It is no longer a part of it, but is rather alienated from it, in conflict with it. We can imagine ourselves today in a sort of revolutionary moment. In a space of 50 years, men and women have reimagined the household in ways unimaginable 60