"For many people, the shift to working from home feels profoundly disorienting. This may be..."

“For many people, the shift to working from home feels profoundly disorienting. This may be especially true for academics. Going to campus means setting aside the emotional intensity of family life in order to take up cerebral concerns. We may even think of ourselves as different people in these two spheres. Yet my own research reminds me that this division between work and home is a surprisingly recent invention. For a long time I’ve been interested in the historical relationship between domesticity and the practice of science. Until the late 19th century, a laboratory was often a makeshift space in a basement or attic, and a field station was no more than a backyard. Nineteenth-century scientists would have been bemused by our perception that home life is somehow too affect-laden to be conducive to scholarship. On the contrary, they were grateful for the aid of relatives and domestic servants, whether as technicians, scribes, or observers. The practice of science at home meant that many middle- and working-class women contributed to research in ways that were never acknowledged in print. So it was that my first experience with online teaching two weeks ago was a meeting of my undergraduate seminar on Gender and Science devoted to the topic of “domestic science.” We read about Charles Darwin’s scientific household, and I invited the students to reflect on their own experiences of scholarly work from home. I think that recognizing the historical contingency of our work/home dichotomy helped free up their critical faculties: we fell into conversation about how isolation was shifting gender roles in their families and accentuating class divides among students. I had worried that they would be reluctant to speak at all on Zoom, but in fact they seemed reluctant to stop.”

- Deborah Coen
(via jacobwren)