Jocelyn Olcott

Jocelyn Olcott is Associate Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her first book, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico, explores questions of gender and citizenship in the 1930s.  Her second book, International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History, considers the history and legacies of the United Nation’s first world conference on women in 1975 in Mexico City (Oxford University Press, forthcoming Spring 2017). Her current project, a biography of the activist and folksinger Concha Michel, a one-time Communist who became an icon of maternalist feminism and a vocal advocate for recognizing the economic importance of subsistence labors, is under contract with Duke University Press. The book follows Michel’s life story from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth to examine the ways that the concept, labor, and policies surrounding “motherhood” articulated with major shifts in political-economic thought — from late-nineteenth-century liberalism to revolutionary nationalism, populism, modernization theory, dependency theory, and neoliberalism.