Living Room Learning Lecture by Dr. Melissa Blair (Week 5)

Please note that the series package includes all seven lectures taking place every Monday from January 25 to March 8, 2027. 

The series will take place in McElreath Hall. Doors open at 1:30pm and lectures begin promptly at 2:00 pm with a brief intermission. Parking is free.

As the United States developed in its first few decades, women’s labor, both paid and unpaid, was critical to its growth. This talk will explore a wide range of women – New England midwives, working-class New Yorkers, middle-class wives moving with their families to frontier locations (like Indiana), enslaved women in the tobacco and rice fields of the South – whose work in their family homes and in the nation’s shops and farms was vital to the success of the new nation. 

Melissa Estes Blair is a professor of history and department chair at Auburn University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and her B.A. from the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on women and politics in the twentieth-century United States. She is the author of co-author of three books: Revolutionizing Expectations: Women’s Organizations, Feminism, and American Politics 1965-1980 (University of Georgia Press, 2014), Bringing Home the White House: The Hidden History of Women Who Shaped the Presidency in the Twentieth Century, (University of Georgia Press 2023), and the textbook American Women’s History: A New Narrative History (Wiley-Blackwell 2023) co-authored with Vanessa Holden and Maeve Kane.