Selected Topics in American Women's History
HIST BC 4402 - Seminar
Rosalind Rosenberg, 420 Lehman Hall
rrosenberg@barnard.edu
Course Description: A critical examination of recent trends in modern U.S. women’s history, with particular attention to the intersection of gender, sexuality, class, and race. Topics will include the state regulation of marriage and sexuality, roots of modern feminism, altered meanings of motherhood and work, and changing views of the body.
Prerequisite: at least one history course, plus selection by the instructor through the on-line, history seminar application process during the prior term.
Requirements and Grading:
Every student must meet with the instructor to discuss his or her research topic and the primary sources on which it will rely at least once before the 5th week of the course.
Readings: Books will be available for purchase at Labyrinth. Most articles are available on-line; all readings are on reserve in the Barnard Library.
Week 1 - Introduction
Week 2 - Perspectives on Sex and Gender
Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), chs. 1-6.
Judith Butler, “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire,” in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990): 1-34.
Week 3 - Perspectives on Race and Gender
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
Week 4 - Perspectives on the State and Gender
Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
Week 5 - Patterns of Resistance
Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Week 6 - Global Currents
Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” The Journal of American History, 88 (December 2001): 829-65. (Recommended: the debate that follows)
Week 7 - Gender and Sex in Time of War
Leisa D. Meyer, Creating G. I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps During World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.)
Week 8 - The Radical Roots of Second-Wave Feminism
Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, The Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), ch. 3.
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, ch. 1.
Week 9 - Laboring Women in Modern America
Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Catherine MacKinnon, “Legal Perspectives on Sexual Difference,” in Deborah Rhode, ed. Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 213-225.
Week 10 - The Sex Wars: Pornography, Desire, and Harassment
Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: Dial Press, 1999).
Andrea Dworkin, “Why Pornography Matters to Feminists” Sojourner, 7 (October 1981).
Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 267-319.
Week 11 - The Body
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Vintage, 1998).
Week 12 – First draft of research paper due – individual conferences
Week 13 –- Class presentations of research, Group 1
Week 14 – Class presentations of research, Group 2
Last Day of Classes – Final draft of research paper due
Guidelines for Writing a Critical Essay*
* These guidelines have been adopted from those written by Amy Richter, a former student in my course “American Women in the Twentieth Century,” for her students. I offer them here as a guide and an inspiration. Amy went on to make good (very good!)as an historian of women. She is the author of Home on the Rails: Women, The Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) and is a professor at Clark University. Go thee forward and do likewise.
A good critical essay will:
Most important, you should seek to explain why the works you are discussing are important in a scholarly, social, cultural, or political context. In explaining the works’ significance you may want to ask one or more of the following:
As
you evaluate the assigned readings for the week you have chosen, situate them
within other scholarly efforts you are reading in this class. Why have the
authors’ chosen their particular topics and methodological approaches? Does this
decision enhance or diminish the field?
You must have a clear thesis statement and muster evidence from the works
to support your analysis. Do not give a laundry list of examples and assume that
the reader will figure out how they support your evaluation of the work under
review. Explain the connections between your argument and the evidence you
present. Make sure your evidence is presented in an orderly and coherent
fashion. The reader should be able to follow easily how the pieces of evidence
fit together to support your evaluation.
Tie together your paper and place the works you are evaluating and your review
of it into a larger historical or analytical framework. Summarize your critique
and connect it to a larger context. Why does your essay matter? How does
it add to our understanding of women's history as a field of study? Do your
thoughts have larger implications for the study of women's history or raise new
types of questions? These or other such questions should be taken up in your
conclusion.
Guidelines for Writing a Research Paper
Choose a primary source – it may be textual, material, visual or aural – that relates to your critical essay and consider the following questions: What point do I want to make about the materials I have found? How does the primary source I have selected confirm, disconfirm, or suggest an alternative mode of interpretation from that offered in the works I have discussed in my critical essay?
Issues to consider as you write your research paper:
1. Topic: A good topic should pose an interesting question that can be answered by available evidence. Have you chosen a source or sources that allows you to answer a question raised or provoked by the readings you have done?
2. Title: A good title is difficult to create. It should excite the reader's interest, while reducing the essay’s core idea to a few words.
3. Statement of Argument / Introduction: The introduction should draw the reader into the topic and make clear where the writer is going. The writer should pose an answerable question and articulate the argument she will construct to answer that question.
4. Discussion of the relevant scholarly literature / Historiography: A good essay is part of a larger conversation among scholars. You will already have considered such a conversation in your critical essay. In your research paper you should incorporate what you have already written and make clear both what your position is and how you are adding to the debate.
5. Primary Sources: the main requirement of the research essay is that it convey a coherent argument that is centered on and driven by original research in primary sources. Does the primary source you have chosen allow you to develop a coherent argument? Do not simply summarize your evidence; show step by step how it advances your argument.
6. Broader Context: To be successful an essay must provide sufficient context to make clear how the particular issues being explored relate to larger social, cultural, economic, political, or intellectual themes. Authors generally rely on secondary sources to establish this context. Be careful to strike the right balance between analysis and context.
7. Details: The note form (either footnotes or endnotes may be used) should be proper and consistent.