History 389: U. S. Women's History Since 1890 University of Massachusetts Spring 2008 T, Th 1:00-1:50 Hasbrouck Lab 126

Paper Cover Sheet Writing Guide Helen Keller Paper Assignment Oral History Assignment Great Expectations: Haven't taken history since high school?

 

 

 

Professor: Laura Lovett                                 TAs: Julie de Chantal, Joel Webb                    

635 Herter Hall                                               7^th floor Herter Hall                           

545-6778                                                         julied@history.umass.edu                  

Lovett@history.umass.edu                             jcwebb@history.umass.edu               

Office Hours:  M 10-11, T 2:15-3:15,

and by appointment                                                  

 

Course Description: In this course we will consider the diverse experiences and social roles of women from the late nineteenth century to the present day. We will emphasize changes in women's political action, social roles, cultural expression, and personal identity. Issues of migration, race and multiculturalism, class and economic opportunity as well as sexuality and feminism will inform our chronological survey of women's history. This course will ask students to read a variety of primary source materials and to synthesize and critique secondary sources.

Texts:  (Books are available at Food For Thought Books, 106 N. Pleasant Street

Amherst, MA 01002. Tel: 413-253-5432)

Required:

¥Linda Kerber and Jane DeHart, Eds., Women's America: Refocusing the Past. 6^th Edition.

¥Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland.

¥Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project.

¥Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs.

Recommended:

¥ David Cline, Creating Choice: A Community responds to the Need for Abortion and Birth Control, 1961-1973.

 

Discussion Sections: 1 - F 9:05-9:55am       63444  New Africa House 114

                                    2 - F 10:10-11:00am   63446  Holdsworth 305

                                    3 - F 12:20-1:10pm    63448  Bowditch 209

                                    4 - F 12:20-1:10          82422  French 106

                                    5 - F 11:15-12:05        82423  Lederle Tower 202

                                    6 - F 9:05-9:55                        82424  Dickinson 210                        

 

Course Website:  https://spark.oit.umass.edu/Spark/entryPageIns.doSpark

Evaluation:

Participation                         15%

Keller Paper                          10%     3-4 pages.  Assigned topics.

Timeline Review Postings       5%

Herland Assignment                5%

Midterm                                20%    

'Second Wave' Project        15%     4-5 page paper. See assignment sheet.

Oral History Project             10%     2 pages.  See assignment sheet and guidelines.

Final                                      20%      

 

Participation: When women were first admitted to institutions of higher learning, including the Morrill Act Land Grant institution you are now attending, they were permitted to sit in the rear of some classes to observe only as long as their presence was not Ôdisruptive.' Alternatively, some women were permitted to attend single sex academies, like Mt. Holyoke, but even these had to push the Ôboundaries' of the kinds of materials women were thought capable of study. As we will discover, women's presence in this classroom and curriculum was a hard-fought-for innovation. I value an active student presence. I have tried to structure the course to allow you to actively engage with the material in this course, and with each other.

Your participation grade has three components: (1) Attendance, (2) Contribution to class discussion, and (3) Spark discussion participation. You are expected to attend every class meeting, to be prepared, and to contribute to our discussion. Each week you will be asked to respond to a reading question on the Spark discussion pages for your section. Questions will be posted on Spark in advance.  Your responses will be due by Wednesday at 9pm.  Your responses should demonstrate that you have read and thought about the class material. Each response will be graded on a two point scale: depending on the quality of your response, you will receive two points, one point, or no points.

 

Grade Scale

The University Grade Scale will be followed:

A = 93 and above; A- = 92-90; B+ = 89-88; B = 83-87; B- = 82-80; C+=79-78; C = 73-77; C- = 72-70; D+ = 69-69; D = 60-67; F = 59 and below.

 

Late Assignments

Numerous problems are lurking out there to help you miss assignment deadlines.  Computer failures, family crises, and misreading the syllabus will all send you scrambling to complete work on time.  Please plan ahead and be ready to work around such problems where possible.  Papers are due at the beginning of class.  Late papers will be docked one third of a letter grade for every day they are late.

 

Academic Honesty

Plagiarism is a serious violation of expected academic conduct.  Your work must be your own.  If you quote or paraphrase work from someone else, you must give credit and provide a reference for that source.  Links to guidelines on plagiarism, including the official policy on academic honesty, can be found on the following webpage: http://www.umass.edu/history/links_writing.html. The penalty for plagiarism in this class is zero credit for the assignment in question.

 

Disabilities

If you have a documented disability that may affect your performance in the class, please speak to me as soon as possible so that appropriate arrangements can be made.

Lecture Schedule (Subject to Change): Please read & prepare the materials assigned before the class meets.

 

T          1/29     Introduction

 

Th       1/31     Education and Opportunity at the Turn-of-the-Century

                        Reading: The Body Project, Introduction and 1-25.

           Edward Clarke, Sex in Education (1873) Excerpt.

 

T          2/5       Library Meeting at Special Collections and University Archives

                        W.E.B. DuBois Library, 25^th Floor 

(Class will be divided into two groups. Sign up for 1:00 or 1:35 group.)

 

Th       2/7       Gender and Jim Crow

Reading: Patricia Schechter, 'Ida B. Wells and Southern Horrors' in Women's America

Glenda Gilmore, "Forging Interracial Links in the Jim Crow South" in Women's America

 

T          2/12     Beyond Wounded Knee

Reading: Zitkala-Sa, '... this semblance of civilization ...'  in Women's America

Devon Abbott (Mihesuah), ''Commendable Progress': Acculturation at the Cherokee Female Seminary,' American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 3. (Summer, 1987), pp. 187-201.

Peggy Pascoe, 'Ophelia Paquet, a Tillamook Indian Wife: Miscegenation laws and the Privileges of Property' in Women's America

 

Th       2/14     Bread and Roses: Working Women's Movements, 1890s-1914

Reading: Annelise Orleck, "From the Russian Pale to Labor Organizing in New York City" in Women's America

Judy Yung, 'Unbound Feet: From China to San Francisco's Chinatown' in Women's America

 

T          2/19     Monday Class Schedule

 

Th       2/21     Helen Keller and Women's Work

                        Reading:

 

T          2/26     Civic Motherhood and Progressive Reform

Reading: Kathryn Kish Sklar, "Florence Kelley and Women's Activism in the Progressive Era" in Women's America

                        Muller v. Oregon in Women's America

Linda Gordon, 'Orphans and Ethnic Division in Arizona: The Mexican Mothers and the Mexican Town' in Women's America

 

T          2/26     Keller Paper Due

 

Th       2/28     From NAWSA to ERA: White Women, Suffrage and the Issue of Race

Reading: Henrietta Briggs-Wall, "Woman and Her Political Peers": Reading Race in a Suffrage Propaganda Cartoon (http://www.kshs.org/cool/coolamwm.htm)

Lucia Maxwell, "Spider Web Chart: The Socialist-Pacifist Movement in America Is an Absolutely Fundamental and Integral Part of International Socialism," The Dearborn Independent, XXIV (22 March 1924): 11.

(http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/wilpf/doc3.htm)

Ellen Carol DuBois, 'Harriet Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage'in Women's America

Nineteenth Amendment, 1920 in Women's America

 

T          3/4       A Feminist Utopia?

Reading: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland. (available in print or online at http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/GilHerl.html)

 

Th       3/7       Flappers and Svelte Bodies

Reading: The Body Project, 97-137

Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth Century America (Oxford Press, 1998), Excerpts.

 

T          3/11     A New Deal for Women?

Reading: Alice Kessler Harris, 'Designing Women and Old Fools: Writing Women into Social Security Law' in Women's America

Jacqueline Jones, "Harder Times: The Great Depression" in Women's America

 

Th       3/13     Midterm

 

T          3/18     Spring Break - No Class

Th       3/20     Spring Break - No Class

 

T          3/25     Home Fronts during WWII  (Last day to drop with a 'W')

Reading: Blanche Wiesen Cook, "Storms on Every Front: Eleanor Roosevelt and Human Rights At Home and in Europe' in Women's America

Gerda Lerner, 'Life Interrupted: A Young Refugee Arrives in America' in Women's America

Valerie Matsumoto, "Japanese-American Women during World War II" in Women's America

Sara Evans, "Rosie the Riveter: Women and War Work during World War II" in Women's America

Th       3/27     Civil Rights

Reading: Pauli Murray, "I had entered law school preoccupied with the racial struggle ... but I graduated an unabashed feminist as well" in Women's America

Civil Rights Act, Title VII, 1964 in Women's America

 

T          4/1       Domestic Ideals and the 1950s

Reading: Daniel Horowitz, "Betty Friedan and the Origins of Feminism in Cold War America" in Women's America

Gerda Lerner, 'Neighborhood Women and Grassroots Human Rights' in Women's America

 

Th       4/3       From Front Porch to Back Seat

Reading: The Body Project, 141-192

Leslie Reagan, 'When Abortion was a Crime: Reproduction and the Economy in the Great Depression' in Women's America

 

F& S          Reproductive Rights Conference at Hampshire College (Recommended)

                                    http://clpp.hampshire.edu/projects/arrc/

 

T          4/8       Women and The Class of '58

Oral History Project Due

 

Th       4/10     HUAC, Homosexuality, and the Pressure to Conform

Reading: Estelle Freedman, 'Miriam Van Waters and the Burning of Letters' in Women's America

Susan K. Cahn, "Mannishness," Lesbianism, and Homophobia in U.S. Women's Sports' in Women's America

Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), Excerpt.

 

T          4/15     Women's Liberation

Reading: Jane S. De Hart, 'Second-Wave Feminists and the Dynamics of Social Change' in Women's America

Redstockings, 'Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination' in Women's America

Phyllis Schalfly, 'The Thoughts of one who loves life as a woman ...' in Women's America

Equal Rights Amendment, 1972 in Women's America

 

Th       4/17     Women and Sports

                        Reading: Title IX, Education Amendments of 1972 in Women's America

 

T          4/22     The Fight for Reproductive Freedom (Bill Baird)

                        Reading: Roe v. Wade, 1973 in Women's America

Jane S. De Hart and Carolyn H. Lewis, 'Thirty Years after Roe: The Continued Assault on a Woman's Right to Choose' in Women's America

Th       4/24     Women's Rights and Reproduction

Reading: Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 1992 in Women's America

 

T          4/29     Lesbian Feminism

Reading: Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, excerpt.

 

Th       5/1       From The War on Poverty to the War on Welfare

Reading: Felicia Kornbluh, 'A Human Right to Welfare? Social Protest among Women Welfare Recipients after World War II' in Women's America

Vivyan C. Adair, 'Inscriptions of Poverty on the Female Body in the Era of Welfare Reform' in Women's America

                       

T        5/6       Backlash: the 1980s and 1990s

Reading: Robin Lakoff, 'Sexual Harassment on Trial' The Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas Narrative(s)' in Women's America

Time Magazine: Is Feminism Dead?

Susan Faludi, "Blame It on Feminism" in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women(New York: Doubleday, 1991), excerpt. (http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst203/documents/faludi.html)

 

T          5/6       Documentation Project Due            

 

Th       5/8       Cultural Backlash in the 2000s

                        Reading:  Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs

 

T        5/13     What is Feminism Today?

Reading: Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs

Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgarten, "What Is Feminism?" in Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000). (http://www.feminist.com/resources/artspeech/genwom/whatisfem.htm)