PPC staff, speaker or author?
Event Speaker

Landon Storrs

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Title & Affiliation
University of Iowa History Department
Bio

Landon Storrs specializes in twentieth-century U.S. social and political history, particularly in the history of women, social movements, and public policy. Her first book, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers' League, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) analyzed female reformers' campaign for state and national wage-hour laws during the Great Depression, when industry migration toward low-cost labor in the U.S. South was driving down wages nationwide. In 2012, Princeton University Press published Storrs’s second book, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left. Based on newly accessible government records and private papers, the book demonstrates that the post-WWII Red scare stunted American public policy by prohibiting discussion of capitalism's tendency to widen social inequalities.  The Second Red Scare also reveals the antifeminism of the Old Right, showing how conservatives exploited popular hostility to female government officials in order to discredit left-liberal policies.  Storrs has published articles in numerous anthologies and journals, including the Journal of American History, Feminist Studies, the Journal of Women’s History, and the Journal of Policy History.

Storrs came to the University of Iowa in Fall 2012 from the University of Houston. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994 and her B.A. from Yale in 1983.