Sample Topics

1. How much interracial cooperation occurred among women in reform movements of the early twentieth century?  What issues brought them together?   What issues divided them? How did their goals differ?  Consider these same questions with respect to inter-religious or cross-class cooperation.

        Possible documents: select from Gerda Lerner, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1992) or something from the Schomberg Collection, available on the Web: Citations for Digital Schomburg Texts.  Papers in the Barnard Archives, Columbiana, and Teachers College Archives relating to the admission and experience of African-American and Jewish students.

       Historiography: Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow (1996); Mary E. Frederickson, "'Each One is Dependent on the Other': Southern Churchwomen, Racial Reform, and the Process of Transformation, 1880-1940," in Visible Women, eds. Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (1993), 296-324; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching, (1979; rev. ed. 1993); Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies (1991); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter (1984), chs. 4-7.

2. Historians often debate to what extent work outside the home was liberating for women. How does this question apply to European immigrant women?  To African-American working women before 1940? To white-collar women workers in the 1950s and 60s?

    Possible documents: Sadie Frowne, "The Story of a Sweatshop Girl," in Plain Folk, eds. David Katzman and William Tuttle (1982), 49-57; "The Harsh Conditions of Dometicx Service" essay in (Ware, 51); Helen Gurley Brown, "Sex and the Single Girl" (Ware, 300), or Citations for Digital Schomburg Texts.

    Historiography: Kathy Peiss,Cheap Amusements (1986); John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters (1988); Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift (1988); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (1989); Tera W. Hunter To 'Joy My Freedom' (1997) or "Domination and Resistance: The Politics of Wage household Labor in New South Atlanta," in "We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible," eds., Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed (1995), 343-358; Margaret Rossiter, Women   Scientists in American, 2. vols (1982; 1995).

3.  The historical study of sexuality raises serious problems of definition.  Is it appropriate to apply the term "lesbian" to women who engaged in homosexual activity before the mid-twentieth century?  What did their behavior mean to them?

    Possible documents:  M. Carey Thomas, The Making of a Feminist: Early Journals and Letters of M.Carey Thomas (1979); Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, Many and Good Crusade (1954); Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter (1995).

    Historiography: Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (1994), 287-91; Blanche Weisen Cook, "Female Support Networks and Political Activism," in A Heritage of Her Own, eds. Nancy F. Cott & Elizabeth Peck (1979)12-44; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The New Woman As Androgyne," in Disorderly Conduct (1985); Hilary Lapsley, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women (1999).

4. Why did women join the antisuffrage movement?

    Possible documents: Annie Nathan Meyer, It's Been Fun: An Autobiography (1951). Interview with anti-suffragist in Lynn Sherr, "Failure is Impossible": Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words (1995), 178-79.

    Historiography: Susan E. Marshall, "In Defense of Separate Spheres: Class and Status Politics in the Antisuffrage Movement," Social Forces 65 (December 1986), 327-251; Elna C. Green, "'Ideals of Government, of Home, and of Women': The Ideology of Southern White Anti-Suffragism," in Hidden Histories of Women in the New South, ed. Virginia Bernhard et al. (1994); Manuela Thurner, "'Better Citizens Without the Ballot': American Anti-Suffrage Women and Their Rationale During the Progressive Era," in One Woman, One Vote, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (1995), 203-220;  Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement (1965).

5. Did protective labor legislation for women help or hurt women workers? What about welfare legislation?

    Possible documents: Muller v. Oregon (Kerber and De Hart, p. 325), any case dealing with hours or wage legislation, any of mothers aid or welfare laws passed during the Progressive Era or later.  See the writings by Elizabeth Baker, a professor of economics at Barnard in the 1920s and 30s.

    Historiography: Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers; Kathryn Kish Sklar, "The Historical Foundations of Women's Power in the Creation of the American Welfare State, 1830-1930," in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World (1993); Judith Baer, The Chains of Protection (1978); Linda Gordon, Pitied, But Not Entitled (1994), Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity (2001).

6. How did the motivations and priorities of middle-class African-American club women (1900-1920) in such organizations as the national Association of Colored Women differ from those of their white counterparts? 

    Possible document: Anna J. Cooper, "Black Women Plan to Lead Their Race," in Ware, 11.

    Historiography: Linda Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women’s Welfare Activism: 1890-1945,” Journal of American History 78 (September 1991): 559-90; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17 (Winter 1992): 251-274. Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies (1991); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter (1984), chs. 4-7); Dorothy Salem, To Better Our World: Black Women in Organized Reform (1990); "We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible," Part IV. 

7. To what extent was World War II an emancipating experience for women?

    Possible documents: any selection from Chapter 8 of the Ware collection: "Rosie the Riveter and Other Wartime Women"; any oral history from Sherna Berger Gluck, ed., Rosie the Riveter Revisited (1987).

    Historiography: William Chafe, The American Woman (1972), chapter on W.W.II; Susan Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond(1982); D'Ann Campbell, Women at War with America (1984)

8. Was Betty Friedan correct when she argued that a "feminine mystique" dominated women's thinking about domestic life in the 1950s?

    Possible documents: "Balancing Work and Family in the 1950s" (Ware, 208); Anne Moody, select an excerpt from Coming of Age in Mississippi, Betty Millard (BC '34), Women Against Myth (1948).

   Historiography: Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound; Joanne Meyerowitz, "Beyond the Feminine Mystique," in Not June Cleaver (1994); Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan: And the Making of the Feminine Mystique (1998); Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation (2001).

9. Why did a women's liberation movement emerge in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s? What did "liberation" mean?

    Possible documents: anything in Anne Koedt, et al, Radical Feminism (1973), or  Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement - Duke Special Collections

    Historiography: Alice Echols, Daring To Be Bad(1989); Sara Evans, Personal Politics (1979).

10. What appeal did New Right politics hold for women in the late 1970s and 1980s?   Why did such women oppose the Equal Rights Amendment?

    Possible documents: Phyllis Schlafly, "The Positive Woman" (Ware, 446-453).

    Historiography: Jane Sherron De Hart and Donald G. Mathews, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of the ERA (1990); Rebecca E. Klatch, Women of the New Right (1987).

11. Women have pursued a variety of different strategies in seeking greater power in American society?  Assess the relative merits of separatist and integrationist efforts.

     Possible documents: Documents from chapters 5 and 6 in Ware; articles from the Baranard Bulletin and the Spectator from the 1970s when students, faculty and administrators were debating the issue of coeducation.

     Historiography: Estelle Freedman, "Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870-1930," Feminist Studies 5 (3) (1979): 512-529;  Marian White Churchill, A History of Barnard (1954).