Join the editors of the Journal of the Civil War Era for a book discussion with Dr. Alexandra Finley, author of An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America's Domestic Slave Trade (UNC Press, 2020). Thurs. Dec. 3 @ 4 pm Eastern.
[This post corrects the original, which provided the correct date but the wrong day of the week.]
Free and open to all. Register here: https://psu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_gPhedr_1QKeSM8oJWziw0w
Alexandra Finley adds crucial new dimensions to the boisterous debate over the relationship between slavery and capitalism by placing women's labor at the center of the antebellum slave trade, focusing particularly on slave traders' ability to profit from enslaved women's domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor. The slave market infiltrated every aspect of southern society, including the most personal spaces of the household, the body, and the self. Finley shows how women’s work was necessary to the functioning of the slave trade, and thus to the spread of slavery to the Lower South, the expansion of cotton production, and the profits accompanying both of these markets.
Dr. Alexandra J. Finley is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. As a scholar, she is interested in the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in American society, particularly as these concepts relate to the economy and work. Her next book project continues to engage histories of household work in early America, focusing on the place of domestic labor in the marketplace of Atlantic port cities.
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