Deborah Dinner
My historical interests concentrate on the dynamic relationships among law, welfare state and employment policies, and family structures. I received my J.D. from Yale Law School in 2005 and am currently researching and writing my dissertation entitled "Pregnancy at Work: Feminism, Maternalism, and the Shaping of Sex Equality Law, 1966-1991." The project examines the twists and turns of political ideology and legal strategy made by business executives, union leaders, judges, attorneys, physicians, conservative activists, and feminists, as they negotiated the consequences of pregnancy for women's citizenship. My narrative begins with the proliferation of efforts to redefine reproduction in the mid-1960s, from campaigns for maternity benefits to imagining a utopia that would replace pregnancy with technological innovation. A liberal solution for reconciling reproduction with sex equality law—the definition of pregnancy as a temporary disability—consolidated by the early 1970s. Almost immediately, however, dissenting voices from the political left and right challenged the capacity for liberal equality to resolve extant controversies surrounding the economic costs and cultural meanings of pregnancy and childbirth. The dissertation concludes with an exploration of how the movement for reproductive health in the workplace, during the late 1970s and 1980s, shifted the debate about legal equality, social protection, and gender.
Joanne Meyerowitz is my adviser and I also work with Jean-Christophe Agnew, Glenda Gilmore, Bob Gordon, and Reva Siegel. I completed oral examination fields in U.S. Social and Political History,1865-1980; U.S. Legal History; and Family, State, and Market in Capitalist Cultures. Some of my most rewarding work during my time in New Haven has included acting as a teaching assistant in courses on constitutional law, U.S. social and political history from 1900 to 1945, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. In 2004, I presented a paper entitled "Transforming Family and State: Women's Vision for Universal Childcare, 1966-71" at both the Law and Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop and the American Society for Legal History Annual Conference.
