Browsing by Subject "Progressive Era"

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    `The Compensation Law Put Us Out of Work': Workplace Injury Law, Commodification, and Discrimination in the Early 20th Century United States
    (2014-07) Holdren, Nate
    This dissertation traces changes in U.S. injury law and injury culture from the late 1890s through the early 1930s. I argue that workmen's compensation legislation passed in the 1910s helped create new forms of inequality. These laws valued women's injuries less than men's injuries and helped create medicalized employment discrimination against people with disabilities. Compensation legislation replaced a court-based system of injury law with an insurance-based administrative system. Under the old system, many injuries when uncompensated. Under the new system, employers had to pay a portion of the financial costs of every employee injury. Employers responded by trying to control those costs by hiring physicians to conduct medical examinations. These examinations were designed to screen out people with physical disabilities and medical conditions that might raise employers' costs in the event of employee injury. Furthermore, compensation laws encouraged what I call the moral thinning of injury, changing how injury was defined as a problem. Injury was no longer understood as a matter of morality or injustice, but as a matter of lost income, a definition of injury that ignored much of human meaning of injury. These changes occurred against the backdrop of what I call the rise of insurance as a worldview in the late 19th century. This worldview treated people as commodities and treated employee injury as an amoral matter of financial security, a problem to be solved by monetary payments. Compensation laws brought the insurance worldview into employers' hiring decisions, bringing about a re-organization of employment practices. I analyze these changes across a range of institutions using sources including trial records, published legal decisions and treatises, business records, and the records and publications of trade associations and conferences, medical associations and conferences, state commissions, and unions.
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    Engineering Kinship: Genetic Technologies, Economic Speculation, and the Queer Body
    (2017-06) Mathiason, Jessica
    Linking the critical humanities to the biological sciences, this dissertation investigates how progressive, queer, and anti-racist techniques and technologies of kinship emerge in Progressive Era eugenic cinema and return, reformulated, in twenty-first-century sci-fi film and television. Drawing on research conducted at the Library of Congress, the Wangensteen Health Sciences Library, and the John E. Allen Archives, I contest the traditional narrative that American eugenics was an exclusively right-wing movement by revealing the surprising appearance of several radical elements—feminism, progressive economics, and social welfare reform—within this otherwise pernicious social project. I argue prominent figures as diverse as the African-American physician Dorothy Ferebee and the Sapphic writer Edith Ellis co-opted eugenic discourses to find support for their social struggles. Today, these progressive strands of eugenic ideology have been de-radicalized through the shift from state-sponsored eugenic projects to corporation-driven geneticism. The new genetics movement has adopted neoliberal theories of growth to overcome economic and ecological limits. Pairing ReGenesis and Orphan Black with an analysis of gene patenting cases brought before the U.S. Supreme Court, I argue this speculative future veers away from the progressives’ valuation of queer difference by employing technological means and legal strategies to compel domestic normativity. Divided into two parts, this dissertation offers a comparative analysis of the ideological inheritance left to what I call “New Eugenic Media” from its counterparts in the Progressive Era through a critical examination of two collections, separated by a century: the U.S. Department of War’s hygiene films from 1915-1922 and sci-fi film and television from 2000-2015.