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The Duty of the Moment: Learning from Pre-Industrial Home-Work Integration 

In this seminar, Erika Bachiochi of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University will discuss how the conflict between responsibilities at home and at work are largely the result of economic transitions to which we still have not adequately responded, nearly a century after industrialization. We tend instead to leave each worker to resolve this disharmony on his or her own, or offer solutions that do not fit most parents’ circumstances or needs. While good scholarship in recent decades has analyzed the impact of industrialization on the decline of the patriarchal family, and Marxist analysis has emphasized the alienation of labor from capital, less attention has been paid to the reality that before industrialization, most work was a thoroughly family affair, conducted in the most important sphere of pre-modern society: the economically interdependent and solidaristic household. After offering gratitude for the many technological advances the industrial era wrought, not to mention the myriad gains for women, Bachiochi will draw out for our time principles and practices that Aristotle and others understood to have governed work-home integration for both men and women in the pre-modern era.

Erika Bachiochi is a Professor of Practice and Director of the Mercy Otis Warren Initiative for Women in Civic Life and Thought at the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. She is also a senior fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, MA and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC. A 2018 Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School, Erika works at the intersection of legal and political theory, constitutional law, women’s history and Catholic social teaching. She is the author of The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision and editor-in-chief of the online journal, Fairer Disputations.

This virtual seminar is part of WAPPP’s weekly fall series Exploring Work & Family, led by Co-Director Hannah Riley Bowles. Attendance is open to all.