The WSU Humanities Center invites faculty, students, staff, and the community to a Brown Bag talk given by Valerie Sweeney Prince (Associate Professor, African American Studies) on the topic of "Laundry: How dirt, water, and cleaning clothes became the real work of America"

Abstract: During the period ranging roughly from the beginning of Reconstruction until the mid-twentieth century, domestic workers imagined themselves as part of a developing democratic enterprise. American democracy, however, has always been challenged by constructions of race, class, and gender. My intent in this talk is to show how the nation came to rely on the condition of a particular type of mundane work and worker, emblemized by three women named Dora Jones, to construct ordinary ways of being. This condition, located at the interstices of race, class, and gender, was key to stabilizing the dynamic site of home and family