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- Lara Vapnek
Professor
Ph.D., History Department, Columbia University, 2000M.Phil., History Department, Columbia University, 1994M.A., History Department, Columbia University, 1992B.A., Barnard College, magna cum laude, with Honors in History, 1990
Lara Vapnek specializes in the history of gender, labor, and political activism in the 19th and 20th-century United States. Her current book project, Mothers, Milk and Money: A History of Infant Feeding in the United States (under contract with Oxford University Press), examines women’s unpaid labor as mothers and explains how medical knowledge, consumer culture, and social policy shaped practices of breast-feeding and bottle-feeding. This research was supported by a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities; a related article appears in the Journal of American History.
Vapnek’s previous publications include two books, Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920 (2009) and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American Revolutionary as well as articles in Feminist Studies and the Journal of Women’s History. She serves as a Contributing Editor to Labor: Studies in Working-Class History.
Professor Vapnek teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on a wide range of topics including Labor History and U.S. Women’s and Gender History. She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, and she has contributed to public programming at numerous cultural institutions in New York City, including the Tenement Museum, the New York Public Library, and the Center for Women’s History at the New York Historical.
Books
Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920, University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American Revolutionary, Routledge Press, 2015.
Select Articles and Chapters
The Labor of Infant Feeding: Wet-Nursing at the Nursery and Child’s Hospital, 1854-1910,” Journal of American History, vol. 109, Issue 1 (June 2022), 90-115.
“Clean Milk for a Dirty City,” Urban Infrastructure: Historical and Social Dimensions of an Interconnected World, edited by Joseph Heathcott, Jonathan Soffer, Rae Zimmerman. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022.
“Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Mortal Enemy of Capitalism,” Communist Women Activists from Around the World, edited by Francisca de Haan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
“An Interview with Alice Kessler-Harris, co-authored with Tony Michels and Annie Polland, Jewish Social Studies, vol. 24, no.2 (Winter 2019), 82-105.
“The Rebel Girl Revisited: Rereading Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s Life Story,” Feminist Studies, vol. 44, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 13-42.
“Women's Labors in Industrial and Postindustrial America,” co-authored with Eileen Boris, Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History, edited by Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor and Lisa G. Materson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
“The 1919 International Congress of Working Women: Transnational Debates on the ‘Woman Worker,’” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 25, no. 4 (Spring 2014): 160-184.
“The International Federation of Working Women, 1919-1924,” scholarly essay, Women and Social Movements, International, edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin. Alexander Street Press, October 2012.
“Staking Claims to Independence: Jennie Collins, Aurora Phelps and the Boston Working Women's League, 1865-1920,” in No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism, edited by Nancy Hewitt. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010.
Recent Presentations (Selected)
“Care is Work,” roundtable participant, Max Conference on Women’s History, Center for Women’s History, New-York Historical Society, March 2024
“Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Behind the Headlines,” Humanities@Home, New Hampshire Humanities Council, Distinguished Lecture for Organization of American Historians, July 2023
“Intimate Labor Revisited: the Legacy of Eileen Boris’s Reconceptualization of Work,” Roundtable Participant, Berkshire Conference on History of Women, June 2023
“Social Reproduction and Everyday Class Struggle in the United States and Spain,” commentator, Labor And Working-Class History Association Conference, May 2023
“Infant Feeding in the United States, 1890s-1910s,” Le Domestique Comme Lieu de Production du Politique, Centre d'Études en Civilisations, Langues et Lettres Étrangères, Université de Lille, December 2023
“Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Mortal Enemy of Capitalism,” Distinguished Lecture for OAH, Waukesha Reads Program, October 2022
“Radical Social Movements in the Village and Battle for Free Speech,” Greenwich Village Preservation Society, October 2022
“The Extra Hazardous Business of Being a Baby,” Dirty History Workshop on Agriculture, Environment, and Capitalism, University of Georgia, September 2022
“The Complex History of Birth Control,” Virtual Tenement Talk, July 2022
“Love, Anarchy, Radical Feminism and Emma Goldman,” Roundtable Participant, Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association,” virtual program, February 2022
“’Little Ones Left Desolate and Dependent’: Institutional Care for the Infants of Wet-Nurses in New York City, 1850-1900,” Society for the History of Children and Youth, virtual program, June 2021
Roundtable on Peter Cole’s Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly, Labor and Working-Class History Association, May 2021
“The Salomé Ensemble,” Center for Women’s History Salon, New-York Historical Society, January 2020
“Woman Suffrage, Race and Class,” roundtable participant, How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty? Woman Suffrage and Women’s Citizenship in the Long History of the 19th Amendment, University of Lille and Nouvelle Sorbonne, January 2020
Undergraduate Courses
History of American Workers
Women and Gender in Early America
Women and Gender in Modern America
Women and Social Movements in U.S. History
Slavery, Democracy and Expansion, the U.S., 1790-1850
The Civil War & Reconstruction
Graduate Seminars
Women in American History
The Civil War
The Gilded Age
New York City and Public History
World History Seminar in Women’s & Gender History
Core Courses
Sophomore Seminar (for history majors)
Senior Seminar (for history majors)
Introduction to U.S. History, Colonial Period to Civil War
Introduction to U.S. History, Civil War to Present