April Haynes

Biography

I am a historian of women, gender, and sexuality in the early US. My research priorities include racialized gender, intimate labor, and women in social movements. I teach courses about labor and working-class history, women in early US/North American history, gender in world history, historiography and historical methods.

My first book, Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-century America, unearths the surprising origins of a sex panic that ultimately prepared many Americans to accept heteronormativity.

My current book project, Tender Traffic: Intimate Labor Movements, 1790-1860, traces the roots of today’s service economy and recovers household and sex workers’ labor activism in the early republic.

I also lead a team of Undergraduate Research Scholars. Since 2024, we have been conducting a quantitative analysis of racialized gender in city jails, county prisons, and state penitentiaries across the northeastern US between 1825 and 1860.

Education

Books

Selected Publications

• “Nineteenth-century Feminist Historiography: Continuities, Intersections, and Breakthroughs,” American Nineteenth-Century History 26:2 (Aug 2025) 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/14664658.2025.2510717.
• “The Other Women’s Rights Movement: ‘Streetwalkers,’ Habeas Corpus, and Anticarceral Activism in New York City, 1830-1860,” Gender & History (Oct. 2024) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0424.12810.
• “From Magdalen Asylum to Labor Depot: The Panic of 1819 and Gendered Economies of Labor,” Journal of the Early Republic 40:4 (Winter 2020) 709-715.
• “Intimate Economies, 1790-1860” in A Companion to American Women’s History, 2^nd edition, eds. Nancy Hewitt and Anne Valk, (New York: Blackwell-Wiley, 2020).
• “Radical Hospitality and Political Intimacy in Grahamite Boardinghouses, 1830-1850,” Journal of the Early Republic 39:3 (Fall 2019).
• “‘Sex-Ins, College-Style’: Black Feminism and Sexual Politics in the Student YWCA, 1968-1980,” in Women’s Activism and ‘Second-Wave’ Feminism: Transnational Histories, ed. Barbara Molony and Jennifer Nelson (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) 37-62.
•  “The Trials of Frederick Hollick: Obscenity, Sex Education, and Medical Democracy in the Antebellum United States,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Volume 12: Number 4 (October 2003), pp. 543-574.

Invited Talks & Research Presentations

• “Negotiation and Refusal: Intimate Labor Movements in the Early United States,” invited lecture, Carleton College Department of History, February 5, 2026.
• “‘I Determined to Get More for My Labor’: Nancy Gardner Prince and the Long History of Domestic Workers’ Unions,” Making Scholarship Matter: Capacious Geographies, Intimate Journeys Conference, University of California-Santa Barbara, Jan. 20, 2026.
• “Intimate Laborers and Social Movements, 1800-1860,” American Studies Association, San Juan, Puerto Rico, November 21, 2025.
• “‘They Know their Value and Take Advantage of It’: Household Workers’ Organizing at the Dawn of an American Service Economy,” invited lecture in University of Oregon History Speaker Series, March 18, 2025.
• “Engendering Carcerality: Authors in Conversation,” invited speaker with Anne Gray Fischer and Rachel Klein. American Society for Legal History: New Works in Legal History Series, Jan. 22, 2025.
• “Gender in 19th-century American History,” with Catherine Clinton and Jim Downs, 30th Anniversary British American Nineteenth-Century History (BrANCH) Conference, Queen’s College, Oxford University, United Kingdom, September 22-23, 2023.
• “An Intimate Labor Theory of Value: Household Workers and the Workingmen’s Movement in the United States, 1820-1850,” Berkshire Conference in the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities, Santa Clara University, June 30, 2023.
• “The Other Women’s Rights Movement: Streetwalkers, Habeas Corpus, and Carceral Feminism in New York City, 1830-60,” Engendering Carcerality Symposium, sponsored by Gender & History and hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara, June 15, 2023.
• “‘Where Ladies Procure Servants and Servants get Places’: female intelligence offices, racialized gender, and intimate labor markets in the early American republic,” American History Research Group, Queen Mary University, London, England, February 23, 2022.
• “Servants, Mistresses and Labour Brokers in Anglo-American Cities, 1650-1850,” Seminar in Economic History, London School of Economics and Political Science, November 18, 2021.

Advisor To

• Abigail Corcoran

Selected Awards

History Courses Taught