About

Emily E. LB. Twarog is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Regina V. Polk Women’s Labor Leadership Conference at the School of Labor and Employment Relations. She is also a Ronald and Lilia Peters LER Faculty Scholar for 2024-2026. Twarog holds a PhD in American History from the University of Illinois at Chicago, with a dissertation titled “Beyond the Strike Kitchen: Housewives and Domestic Politics, 1936-1973.” Her academic background also includes a Master’s degree in American History and a Master’s in Labor Research and Resource Center from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Women’s Studies from the same institution. Her research takes an intersectional approach to examining the history of women, work, and organizations, as well as current strategies for building women’s leadership within the labor movement. She is currently working on a book exploring the history of sexual harassment resistance among US service sector workers in the 20th century. Twarog has published works on topics such as food and consumer protest, gender and racism in electoral politics, and women’s labor leadership education, contributing to the fields of labor history and social movement studies.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Engineering
• Sociology
• Telecommunications
• Development economics
• Law
• Medicine
• Medical emergency
• Labour economics
• Criminology
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Public relations

Selected publications

• What Trump 2.0 Means for Women's Bodies

  Labor Studies Journal · 2025-06-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This brief essay considers how the bodies of workers—women and LGBTQ folks in particular—are regularly sites of contestation and violence. The result of the 2024 election cycle—the election of Donald Trump as president, the Republican Party dominating Congress, and a cabinet filled with people who have either engaged in sexual violence or willingly dismissed claims of sexual violence – decreases the ability of women and LGBTQ workers to respond to and demand actions against those perpetrating workplace violence. The body as a site of contestation is not a new concept. Labor historians have explored in depth how the bodies of all workers—enslaved, indentured, imprisoned, and employed—have been exploited to build capital and political power. In a cabinet that is riddled with people who have either perpetrated or allowed sexual violence to happen, what protections can workers expect from the government when they face sexual violence or discrimination in the workplace?

  PublisherDOI

• Challenging Workplace Hostility: How Collective Action Can Address Sexual Harassment

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  With millions of women sharing their experiences of harassment and abuse, the #MeToo movement confirmed what research had long shown: sexual harassment is a pervasive issue that disproportionately impacts women. Yet, despite the visibility of the #MeToo movement, which raised public awareness and prompted legislative and workplace policy changes, it appears that these efforts have had minimal impact on women’s experiences. This symposium brings together research that examines workplace sexual harassment from multiple perspectives and levels of analysis, specifically by examining how workers respond to harassment on an individual level, how organizations respond through social media campaigns, and the role of institutional interventions in facilitating policy change. Together, the included presentations offer important insights into addressing sexual harassment and promoting safer, more equitable workplaces. Compensating for Sexual Harassment: Gender and the Demand for Harassment-Free and Hybrid Workplaces Author: Manuela Collis; University of Toronto Author: Clementine Van Effenterre; University of Toronto (Not?) Tweeting Right through It: The Role of Gender in Justice Organizations’ Response to #MeToo Author: Michael Maffie; Cornell University Confronting Sexual Harassment in the Service Industry through Collective Bargaining Author: Emily E. LB. Twarog; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Raising the Bar: Combating Sexual Harassment through Collective Bargaining Author: Shannon Potter; University of Toronto Author: Rachel Aleks; University of Windsor Author: Tina Saksida; University of Prince Edward Island

  PublisherDOI

• Review of “Upsetting Food: Three Eras of Food Protest in the United States”

  Social Forces · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Development economics
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Is US Labor Law Reform Enough? A Conversation About the “Clean Slate for Worker Power”

  Labor Studies Journal · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Labour economics

  In this roundtable, labor studies scholars examine the viability of the Clean Slate for Worker Power project. Engaging themes such as labor law, immigrant workers, and organizing strategies, the contributors debate the limits of U.S. labor law, the tendency of scholars to silo our work and our research without engaging an intersectional approach, and the practical realities that impact the U.S.' low rates of unionization.

  PublisherDOI

• Before #MeToo: The History of the 9to5 Job Survival Hotline

  Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Public relations
  • Psychology

  Abstract In the 1970s and 1980s, the tension between achievable goals and systemic change defined the work of the women's movement. This was very evident in the fight to end sexual harassment in the workplace. This article examines how 9to5, a national organization of women workers, created their own effective means of response, hence the early success of 9to5. In particular, it explores the use of the telephone hotline as a critical tool in information gathering and organizing.

  PublisherDOI

• The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter: A Memoir

  Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas · 2019-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Review Article| September 01 2019 The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter: A Memoir The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter: A MemoirDurham, Jane Lazarre, NC: Duke University Press, 2017 214 pp., $29.95 (cloth) Emily E. LB. Twarog Emily E. LB. Twarog University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2019) 16 (3): 121–122. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-7570027 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Emily E. LB. Twarog; The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter: A Memoir. Labor 1 September 2019; 16 (3): 121–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-7570027 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search Jane Lazarre’s memoir about her father is at once an intimate look into a rocky father- daughter relationship and an account of the fascinating life of a leader in the American Communist Party. Lazarre is not new to the art of the memoir. She is the author of Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness, which shares her experience of raising black sons as a white Jewish mother married to a black man, and her book The Mother Knot, originally published in 1976, continues to be a classic exploration of the myth of “the good mother.” In her latest memoir, The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter, Lazarre comes full circle to examine her relationship with her father, who spent his life as a dedicated organizer in the Communist Party. The book is an amalgam of “chaotic shards of experience, memories... Copyright © 2019 Labor and Working-Class History Association2019 You do not currently have access to this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Epilogue

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2017-10-19

  book1st authorCorresponding

  The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 encouraged a growing cadre of socially conservative housewives whose agenda focused on conservative social issues that matched the shifting neo-liberal economic ideology that was taking root. These conservative housewives saw themselves in opposition to the elite, politically connected feminists who, they felt, derided their contentment as housewives. As the New Deal vision of state intervention to protect the American standard of living faded, domestic politics 1980s style would be defined by individual over collective needs. The Epilogue is a reflection on the state of food activism in the neo-liberal economy. It considers US as well as global protests and organizing efforts to lower the high cost of food as well as provide access to healthy, affordable foods.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2017-10-19

  book1st authorCorresponding

  The introduction traces the involvement of working-class housewives in political action from the 1930s as their involvement in cost of living protests, such as meat boycotts, led to a complicated involvement in organized political action. Tracing the entrance of these women into the political sphere through the emergence of the conservative right, it argues that as housewives negotiated the intersection of their homes, labor, community, and the marketplace, they formed a unique political constituency group in the twentieth century, which failed to find cohesion with the second-wave feminism in the 1970s, which dismissed domestic politics that these women were engaged in because it was rooted in the traditional family model, viewed with suspicion by works like Betty Friedan’s <italic>The Feminine Mystique</italic>. This left a distinctive form of activism to pave the way for conservative women’s movement made famous by anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly and the conservative watch group the Eagle Forum.

  PublisherDOI

• “Without Any Suspicion of . . . Communism”

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2017-10-19

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Chapter 3 picks up the story of the decline of women’s union auxiliaries as the CIO grew more conservative and many working-class families relocated to the suburbs. With the 1955 merger of the CIO and AFL, the militant and engaged CIO auxiliary structure struggled to survive as the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education (COPE) Women’s Activities Department (WAD) began to encroach on auxiliary turf around the country. The chapter then shifts to tell the story of Esther Peterson’s work in the White House as the first special assistant to the president for Consumer Affairs. Focusing on her efforts to create a space for housewives to voice their concerns, Peterson was often met with roadblocks within a White House that exhibited little real concern for the American consumer.

  PublisherDOI

• Organizing in the 1970s

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2017-10-19

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In 1973, housewives in California launched what would be the last meat boycott of the twentieth century. And, like its predecessors, the 1973 boycott gained national momentum albeit with little political traction now that Peterson had left public life for a job in the private sector as the consumer advisor to the Giant grocery store chain. And in some quarters of the labor movement, activists drew very clear links between the family economy and the stagnation plaguing workers’ wages. The 1973 boycott led to the founding of the National Consumers Congress, a national organization intended to unite consumer organizers. While it was a short-lived organization, it demonstrates the momentum that consumer activism was building. This chapter also reflects on the lost coordinating opportunity between housewives organizing around consumer issues and the women’s movement in the 1970s.

  PublisherDOI

Awards & honors

• Ronald and Lilia Peters LER Faculty Scholar, 2024-2026
• Labor Education Program (Chicago)