History of Women in America, 1865-Present
Spring 2013
This course will explore the significance of gender in United States from the Civil War to the present. We will ask how people’s ideas about gender structured society and how social relations defined what it meant to be a man or a woman. Readings and discussion will focus on three particular areas of inquiry: the rights and obligations of citizenship; the value and division of labor; and the configuration of emotional life (including familial relationships, erotic desires, and individual aspirations). Resisting any transhistorical definition of womanhood, we will investigate how understandings of gender developed in relation to racial, ethnic, class, and regional differences.
The goal of this course is to become adept at generating your own historical analysis through the study of primary documents. The majority of the readings consist of primary sources—letters, diaries, legal documents, and fiction written by or about women in the past. In addition, you will read a few secondary sources in order to assess how professional historians analyze and employ evidence. Through short weekly writing assignments and class discussion, you will use these readings to develop your own analytical skills. Lectures will introduce topics not covered in the readings. Two papers (five to seven pages each) will require you to synthesize the readings, lectures, and discussion in order to generate your own arguments about the significance of gender in the American past.
This course fulfills the second writing requirement.
Required Readings:
- Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
- Mae Ngai, The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2010).
- Theresa Malkiel, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker(1910; rpnt. Kessinger Publishing, 2010).
- Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Delta, 2004).
- Miriam Schneir, Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
Additional readings are posted in the resources section of Collab and available in a bound reader at Brillig Books.
