History
697I: Topics in US Women's and Gender History
University
of Massachusetts, Amherst
Fall
2009
Laura Lovett
635 Herter Hall
545-6778
Office Hours: Wednesday 2:30-3:30, and By Appt (typically available
the hour before class)
This
course will focus on selected topics in U. S. women's and gender history from
the colonial era to the present. Our focus will be on how interpretations of
women's experience have been influenced by changing conceptions of race,
ethnicity, sexuality, family, class, religion, region, immigration, economics,
and politics. We will consider and compare the lives of Native American women,
African American women, Asian American women, Latina women, and European
American women from the colonial period through industrialization and into the
twentieth century. We will give special consideration to different forms of
women's political participation, to the influence of different conceptions of
masculinity and femininity on political and cultural discourse, and to changing
scientific constructions of body norms, ability and disability, reproduction,
race, and eugenics, womanhood and motherhood, heterosexuality and
homosexuality.
Evaluation:
Reading Reponses: (30%)
Write
a 2-3 page response to each week's reading. The first half of your response should
carefully summarize the main arguments of the week's reading, while the second
half of you response should offer your critical appraisal of those arguments,
their presentation, and their evidential support. Because you have a limited amount of space, you cannot
discuss everything assigned for each week. Please focus your response of the argument or theme that you
find most significant or interesting.
Your responses should be submitted through the assignment link on
our course Spark page by 9am on Wednesday. (If you do not have access to Spark,
please email your response to me.) Your first response is due on September 16th
for the reading on Women's Lives and Colonial Categories assigned for that
day. Your responses will be graded
on three-point scale with 3 being highest and 1 lowest. Your responses will be
released to the class after our class meeting for review or comment. If you
must miss class, this will allow you to get a glimpse of the discussion that
you missed and to participate in some capacity.
Discussion Facilitator and Weekly
Participation (30%)
The
success of this seminar depends on your active engagement and participation
every week. The response papers
should help you organize your thoughts before coming to class. Please be ready to share your
reflections.
Each
week one of us will act as the discussion facilitator. Facilitators will begin the seminar
with a short (5 minutes or so) presentation that provides an overview of the
week's reading, what they consider to be the central issues raised in the
reading, and 2 or 3 questions to launch class discussion. Each week, we will have a historiographical essay to help situate the reading. These
essays should make facilitating an intellectually engaging discussion possible.
The facilitator's role is to get us started and to keep us going, not carry the
conversation. If you have any questions about how to facilitate a seminar
discussion or about your week's reading, please meet with me. A sign-up sheet for discussions will be
circulated at our first meeting.
The schedule will be posted on our class website.
Historiography Paper
(40%)
Write
a 12-15 page historiography paper on a topic of your choice related to U.S.
Women's and Gender history. I will distribute a list of emerging areas in
this field that do not appear on this syllabus. You may want to consider one of these areas or propose an
area that you think is new and emerging or not included on our syllabus. This paper is intended to allow you to
extend and sharpen your skills of historiographical analysis.
Your paper should discuss the most important works related to your area and critically
analyze how the scholarship you are considering has developed over time. Please
consider how and why the questions, methodologies, sources, and interpretations
in your chosen area have changed over time? Among the starting points for historiographical
considerations are review essays published in the journals such as the Journal of American History, American Historical Reviews, Reviews in American
History, the Journal of Women's History, Signs, Gender and History, Women's
Review of Books, etc.
If
you have a documented disability that may affect your performance in the class,
please speak to the instructor as soon as possible so that appropriate
arrangements can be made.
Texts: (available at
Food For Thought Books and On Reserve in the UMASS Library -3 day reserve so
contact the class if you need it.)
* Pamela
E. Brooks, Boycotts, Buses, And Passes:
Black Women's Resistance in the
U.S. South and South Africa (UMass 2008)
* Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches
& Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (UNC
Press, 1996).
* Constance
Curry, Joan C. Browning, and Dorothy Dawson Burlage, Deep in Our
Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement (University of Georgia
Press,
2002)
*
Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow (University
of North Carolina Press, 1996)
* Thaviola Glymph, Out
of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge
University Press, 2008).
* Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (Penguin
1994)
* Susan J. Kleinberg,
Eileen Boris and Vicki Ruiz, Eds., The Practice of
U.S.
Women's
History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues (New
Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2007).
* Allison
Schneider, Suffragists in an Imperial
Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman
Question, 1870-1929 (Oxford 2008)
* Alex Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of
Better Breeding in
> Modern
> America, (University of
California Press, 2005)
* Anne Valk, Radical Sisters: Second-Wave
Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. (University of Illinois
Press, 2008).
* Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (Persea
Books; 3 edition, 2003)
Reading: You are expected to do the assigned reading in advance of
each class. A bibliography of
recommended reading will be made available online at the course website.
Course Website: https://spark.oit.umass.edu
Schedule (subject to change)
Reading:
* Alice Kessler-Harris, "Do We Still Need Women's
History?," The
Chronicle Review December 7,
2007.
* Gerda
Lerner, "Placing Women in History," Feminist Studies 3 (1975) 5-14.
* Rayna Green, "The Pocahontas Perplex," Massachusetts Review 27 (1975).
* Susan J. Kleinberg,
Eileen Boris and Vicki Ruiz, "Introductions," in The Practice of
U.S.
Women's
History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues
Reading:
*
Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches & Anxious Patriarchs:
Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia
* Jennifer Morgan, "'Some Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder'," The William And Mary Quarterly 54 (1997)
167-192.
*
Ann Stoler, "Tense and
Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post)
Colonial Studies,"
Haunted by Empire (Duke University
Press, 2006), 23-67.
* Gail MacLeitch,
"'Your Women Are of No Small Consequence': Native American Women, Gender, and
Early American History," in The
Practice of
U.S.
Women's History: Narratives, Intersections, and
Dialogues
Reading:
*
Laurel Ulrich, The Midwives's
Tale (portion, no book ordered)
* Jeanne Boydston,
"The Pastoralization of Housework," Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the
Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (Oxford 1991).
*
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations
between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs 1 (1975), 1-30.
*
Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Historical Review 91 (December
1986): 1053-1075.
* Susan Branson, "From Daughters of
Liberty to Women of the Republic: American Women in the Era of the American
Revolution," in The
Practice of
U.S.
Women's History: Narratives, Intersections, and
Dialogues
Reading:
* Thaviola Glymph, Out
of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge
University Press, 2008).
* Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham,
"African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage
of Race." Signs 17 (Winter
1992): 251-274.
* Susan Grant, "To Bind Up the Nation's
Wounds: Women and the American Civil War," in The Practice of
U.S.
Women's History: Narratives,
Intersections, and Dialogues
Reading:
* Allison
Schneider, Suffragists in an Imperial
Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman
Question, 1870-1929 (Oxford University Press, 2008)
* Elizabeth Clapp, "The Woman Suffrage
Movement, 1848-1920," in The
Practice of
U.S.
Women's History: Narratives, Intersections, and
Dialogues
Reading:
*
Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow
*
Gail Bederman, ""The White Man's Civilization on
Trial": Ida B. Wells, Representations of Lynching, and Northern Middle-Class
Manhood," in Manliness and Civilization
(University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 45-76.
* Laura Briggs, "Gender and Imperialism,"
in The Practice of
U.S.
Women's History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues
10/21 Women, Labor, and Immigration
Reading:
* Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (Persea
Books; 3rd edition, 2003)
* Amy Kaplan,
"Manifest Domesticity," American
Literature 70 (1998) 581-606.
* Donna Gabaccia
and Vicki Ruiz, "Migrations and Destinations: Reflections on the Histories of
U.S. Immigrant Women," in The
Practice of
U.S.
Women's History: Narratives, Intersections, and
Dialogues
Optional: (one of the following)
*
Nan Enstead, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure
* Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements.
* Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire
* Martha Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen
Reading:
* Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky and
Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather,
Slippers of Gold : The History of a Lesbian Community
* Leisa Meyer,
"Interrupting Norms and Constructing Deviances: Competing Frameworks in the
Histories of Sexualities in the United States," in The Practice of
U.S.
Women's History: Narratives,
Intersections, and Dialogues
11/4 Eugenics Then and Now
* Alex Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of
Better Breeding in
Modern
America, (University of California
Press, 2005).
* Vicki Ruiz, "Morena/o,
Blanca/o, y Cafˇ con Leche: Racial Constructions in Chicana/o Historiography," in The Practice of
U.S.
Women's History: Narratives,
Intersections, and Dialogues
11/17 Gail Collins
Reading in South Hadley, 7pm
Author of When
Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the
Present
Reading:
* Pamela
E. Brooks, Boycotts, Buses, And Passes:
Black Women's Resistance in the
U.S. South and South Africa (UMass 2008)
* Jacqueline Castledine, TBA
11/25 Food Ways: Cream Sauces and
Thanksgiving (Optional)
Reading:
* Laura Shapiro, Perfection
Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century
(Modern Library, 2001).
Reading:
* Constance Curry, Joan C. Browning, and Dorothy Dawson Burlage, Deep in Our
Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement (University of Georgia
Press,
2002).
* J. Anthony Lukas, "Sue" in Don't
Shoot We Are Your Children (Random House, 1968, excerpt)
* Winifred Breines, "Introduction," in The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in
the Feminist Movement (Oxford University Press, 2006).
* Mary Ellen Curtain, " Strong People and
Strong Leaders: African American Women and the Modern Black Freedom Struggle,"
in The Practice of
U.S.
Women's History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues
Reading:
* Anne Valk, Radical Sisters: Second-Wave
Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. (University of Illinois
Press, 2008).
* Mary
P. Ryan, "Where Does Sex Divide?" in Mysteries
of Sex (UNC Press, 2006).