The Gender of Poverty: How Women Overseas Became the Deserving Poor Joanne Meyerowitz, Yale University Hosted by the UC Davis History Department
This lecture looks at late 20th-century campaigns to empower
impoverished women overseas. At the very moment that
conservatives vilified poor women in the U.S. as welfare cheats,
anti-poverty advocates positioned poor women overseas as selfless
and hardworking.
Joanne Meyerowitz is the Arthur Unobskey
Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. A
past president of the Organization of American Historians and a
former editor of the Journal of American History, she is the
author of How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality (2002) and
the editor of Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar
America, 1945–1960 (2004) and History and September 11th (2003).
Her new book, A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of
Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit (Princeton University
Press, 2021), is a history of U.S. involvement in campaigns to
end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s.
THIS EVENT IS SPONSORED BY THE UC DAVIS HISTORY DEPARTMENT’S
PROGRAM IN WOMEN’S AND GENDER HISTORY AND THE DEPARTMENT OF
GENDER, SEXUALITY AND WOMEN’S STUDIES.
