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

Erika Bachiochi of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University will speak in this seminar about the conflict between responsibilities at home and at work, asserting that it is 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 to offer solutions that do not fit most parents’ circumstances or needs. 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 family affair conducted in the most important sphere of pre-modern society: the economically interdependent and solidaristic household. In her seminar, after offering gratitude for the industrial era's many technological advances and gains for women, Bachiochi will draw out for-our-time principles and practices that Aristotle and others understood to have governed work-home integration 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, D.C., and was 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 and Family, led by WAPPP co-director Hannah Riley Bowles. Attendance is open to all.