The post 2023 Nov: “Threads of Solidarity: Storytelling, Laughter, and Clubbing in Justice Activism,” ASA first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.

The post 2023 Oct: “Political Power, Community Organizing, and Unionizing,” UHA first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.

The post 2023 June: “Women of Color and Postwar Worker Activism: Using Federal Agencies to Organize While Marginalized,” HOTCUS first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.

The post 2023 June: “Women of Color and Postwar Labor Activism: Using Federal Laws at the Local and State Level to Organize While Marginalized,” LCH first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.

In 1984 and 1985, Gloria Maldonado and several Puerto Rican needleworkers in New York City shared their experiences with three women scholars for a public history project titled “Nosotras Trabajamos en la Costura.”

The post 2022 Oct: “‘Nosotras Trabajamos en la Costura’: Gloria Maldonado and Puerto Rican Needleworkers in Public History Production, 1983-1987,” PRSA first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.

The post 2022 April: “The Crisis of Contingency and the Erosion of Research,” Scholarly Work and the Work of Scholarship in an Era of Contingency, OAH Boston first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.

The post 2021 April: “Beyond the Fields: Gender, Labor, and the Public Legacies of Puerto Rican Farm Workers and Needleworkers,” Shade Research Collective Symposium first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.

Organized the roundtable Women and Workplace Activism in the Postwar U.S.: Persistent Efforts to Move Systems with six other women scholars. Presented my paper “Organizing While Marginalized: Gloria Maldonado and Lucy Sledge in the Textile and Garment Industry, 1960s-1970s.” The roundtable explored organized activism women have used to demand better conditions for paid labor. Women in the U.S. have always worked, but the number of women entering the workforce increased dramatically after World War II. As they confronted challenges of classism, racial bigotry, gender discrimination, and accelerating globalization, working women pursued organized and institutional means for making claims for fair employment. Our papers covered different methods of organizing, such as established labor unions, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the founding of new worker groups like the Household Technicians of America. All the papers addressed intersections of gender, race, class, and status of the job to examine the workers’ efforts to change their conditions. We offered new approaches to understanding labor activism and the postwar U.S. economy that question the tendency to focus on “deindustrialization” and the declining membership of masculine unions as the primary experiences of American workers in that time period.

The post 2019 June: Women & Workplace Activism in the Postwar U.S.: Persistent Efforts to Move Systems, LAWCHA, Duke University first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.

The post 2018 April: “Homework, Sweatshops, Factories, and Mills: The New South, Puerto Rico, and Labor Markets for Neoliberalism,” Organization of American Historians first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.

A chance conversation with a colleague led to the realization that Puerto Rican women migrated to the Northeast in the 1960s and 1970s for jobs in old textile and garment factories. That evidence contradicts the dominant historical narrative of the industry “dying” in New England as it relocated in one direction, southward. Puerto Rican women were one interconnected if not interchangeable labor market critical to how a complex global working class coalesced. Documents and oral histories of white and Puerto Rican women workers have been collected in distinct archives, leading to misconceptions about the industry and the development of capitalism. In order to explore such historical relationships, scholars have to acknowledge their specific positionality, the bounded “field of visibility” for their specialty. They can then search for links across archives that have been “disjunctured” by colonial practices or constrained by formal practices of organizing knowledge. Both the Dodd Center at UConn and the Connecticut Historical Society have collections for these women workers that historians can approach in this way.

The post 2018 May: “Fragmented Archives: Northeastern Millworkers and Puerto Rican Needleworkers in the Same Industry, Different Collections,” Association for the Study of Connecticut History first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.