Women's History Courses

Moving from 19th-century struggles against slavery to recent uprisings against apartheid and global capitalism, this seminar explores women’s relationships to revolutions that have shaped the modern world. Although the course focuses largely on US history, we will also consider developments in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Topics include the revolutionary work of well-known individuals such as Harriet Tubman, Luisa Capetillo, Aleksandra Kollontai, Yuri Kochiyama, Mamphela Ramphele, and Rigoberta Menchu; unsung women’s essential contributions to revolutionary movements around the globe; the ways in which revolutions have addressed—or failed to address—women’s demands for equality and self-determination; and the emergence of independent women’s movements within national revolutions. Reading includes memoir, fiction, and political treatises, as well as historical scholarship. 

This course combines an intensive one-week seminar with independent study culminating in the capstone paper.

This intensive seminar is designed for students and practitioners who seek to apply historical knowledge to issues of gender policy and advocacy. Readings, discussions, and a wide range of guest speakers will address policy initiatives and advocacy projects that make impacts on women’s lives on local, national, and international levels. Students will acquire skills and knowledge essential to careers in public service, NGOs, and elsewhere in the nonprofit sector.

The education system is a central institution in the socialization of young people and the maintenance of the modern nation-state. Schools support meritocratic models of society by providing opportunities for social mobility. Paradoxically, schools also reproduce gender, racial, and class inequality. In this course, we will examine the roles that schools play in the transmission of culture, formation of identity, and reproduction of social structures. Paying special attention to gender and its intersection with other social categories, we will look at practices and policies that shape students’ performance as they strive for competence, achievement, and acceptance. We will also analyze the larger political and economic contexts that shape both schools and the communities in which they are situated.

In this course, we will engage with the field of visual culture in order to develop a critical framework through which we may understand visual perception as a set of practices that inform, and are informed by, structures of power. Throughout the semester and the year, we will consider the following questions: What does it mean, from a historical perspective, to live in a society that seemingly privileges visual perception? How does power figure into past and contemporary viewing practices? How have visual technologies been leveraged to situate alternative practices of looking more squarely within the Western public’s fields of vision? We will accomplish this by focusing on the rich scholarship of visual culture theory; media and communication scholarship that foregrounds gender and racial analysis; and the excellent work that bridges media/visual studies and women’s history. We will work with a variety of examples, including art, advertising, print magazines, television programming, film, and social media. Readings roughly span the 19th century through the contemporary era. Through our readings, we will observe the ways in which the 19th-century production and circulation of images of the “other” and a gendered gaze began to take on a particular potency in the United States and Europe with the growth of industrialization, commercial advertising, and immigration. Twentieth-century scholarship will focus on, among other things, the rise of a global media landscape in which the lines between producers and consumers of media become increasingly blurred. An examination of contemporary viewing practices will enable us to consider some of the implications of a radically fractured “mediascape” and its attendant struggles over ownership of meaning, as media technologies enable visual processes of signification to spin out wildly in unpredictable and surprising directions.

Students in this course undertake independent projects in close consultation with the instructor. These projects range widely, from primary research and explorations of historiography to fieldwork and internships at agencies engaged in advocacy, policymaking, public history, or other initiatives of interest to women’s historians. While students pursue individual goals and meet one-to-one with the instructor, the whole class convenes several times each term for dinner, presentations on independent projects, and discussion of common concerns.

Students in Research Methods Workshop become acquainted with the campus library, train in the use of online bibliographic databases (Project Muse, JSTOR, and others), primary sources including digital material online, and learn methods of locating hard-copy archives relevant to one’s research. In the spring, students take a field trip to an archive with the instructor. This class meets monthly during the fall semester and once in the spring.

This yearlong course is designed for students who are writing MA theses in women’s and gender history. We will discuss the historiographical dimensions of thesis work; assess various research methods, interpretive models, and theories of history; and grapple with practical questions about writing and documentation. Readings include historical with scholarship, theoretical works, and research guides. At critical junctures, students will also read and evaluate each other’s work.

This seminar surveys pathbreaking studies in the history of women, gender, and related subjects. Course readings, which include both theory and historiography, exemplify major trends in feminist scholarship since the 1960s—from early challenges to androcentric worldviews to the current stress on differences among women and multiple systems of dominance and subordination. Class discussions range from fundamental questions (e.g., What is feminism? Is “women” a meaningful category?) to theoretical, interpretive, and methodological debates among women’s historians. The course is designed to help advanced students of women’s history clarify research interests by assessing the work of their predecessors. MA candidates will also use the course to define thesis projects.