We’re highlighting panels of interest at the upcoming Seventeenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities to be held June 1-4, 2017, at Hostra University in Hempstead, New York, USA.  While these panels do not necessarily bill themselves as being about rural women, all of those we’ve chosen to highlight will examine issues of rurality in significant ways.

Berks Panels of Interest, Part III

s1481 – Intersections of Gender, Racialized Labor, and Colonial Formations in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Great Lakes

Friday, June 2, 2017: 10:15 AM-11:45 AM

BRESL 111 (Hofstra University)

Chair:

Lucy Murphy, Ohio State University

From Raised to Trade to Razed by Trade: French and Native Women in the Eighteenth-Century Fur Trade
Karen L. Marrero, Wayne State University

Maple Sugar Trade Tensions: Abolitionist Expansion and Ojibwe Women’s Land Claims in the Upper Great Lakes, 1787 to 1840
Emily J. Macgillivray, University of Michigan

We are Real Indians in Our Everys: Domestic Work, Wage Labor and the Making of Anthropology
Maeve Kane, University at Albany, SUNY

Comment:

Lucy Murphy, Ohio State University

Session Abstract

This panel positions gender as a central lens for interpreting Great Lakes history from the early 1700s to the mid-1800s by demonstrating that multiple forms of labor performed by women of African, Native, and European descent shaped important events in the region, including political conflicts, legal trials, and treaties. Taking women of different racial backgrounds and the various forms of labor they engaged in as departure points, these papers explore the relationship between gender, racialized labor, and French, British and American forms of colonialism in the Great Lakes.  From the labor of enslaved women of Native and African descent in the Illinois Country under French rule, to French and Native women’s procurement of trade goods in eighteenth-century economic hubs after the British gained control of the region, to the relationship between Ojibwe women’s production of maple sugar and the expanding American republic in the nineteenth century, this panel explores the various ways women with differing access to power performed multiple forms of labor as a central part of their livelihood. Together these papers illustrate how women accessed and participated in economic networks while control of the region shifted between imperials powers and non-Native settlement intensified throughout the Great Lakes.  By looking at the ways women engaged in free and unfree labor, this panel makes both historiographical and methodological interventions by foregrounding the importance of a gendered and racialized history of labor in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Great Lakes.