Discussing Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought

Monday, February 3rd, 5pm
Blithewood Conference Room or on Zoom

Join us for our first session of the 2025 Spring Semester, with Susanna Ferguson, Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at Smith College, on Monday, February 3rd, from 5pm to 6pm in the Levy Conference Room at Blithewood, or on Zoom. Dr. Ferguson’s presentation will be followed by an open Q&A session with audience members—both those in person and on Zoom are welcome to ask questions. This event is co-sponsored by Levy and the Global and International Studies (GIS) Program.

Light refreshments will be served.

REGISTER TO ATTEND ON ZOOM

Join the Levy Institute’s Program on Gender Equality and the Economy and Bard’s Global and International (GIS) Program as we host Susanna Ferguson to discuss her recent book, Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought, which traces the political power of motherhood and childrearing in Arabic thought. Ferguson will sit down with Levy’s Belle Cheves and Bard’s Middle Eastern Studies’ Ziad Dallal to discuss her work. In Labors of Love, Ferguson reveals how debates around raising children became foundational to feminist, Islamist, and nationalist politics alike—opening up conversations about civilization, society, freedom, temporality, labor, and democracy. While these debates led to expansions in girls’ education and women writers’ authority, they also attached the fate of nations to women’s unwaged labor in the home. Ferguson thus reveals why women and the family have been stumbling blocks for representative regimes around the world. She shows how Arab women’s writing speaks to global questions—the devaluation of social reproduction under capitalism, the stubborn maleness of the liberal subject, and why the naturalization of embodied, binary gender difference has proven so difficult to overcome.

Susanna Ferguson is a historian of women, gender, and intellectual life in the Eastern Mediterranean at Smith College. Her research focuses on how questions about gender, sex, and science shaped political imaginaries in the 19th- and 20-century Arab world. Ferguson’s first book, Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought was published by Stanford University Press in September 2024.