History 697I: Topics in US
Women's and Gender History
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Fall 2007
Laura Lovett
635 Herter Hall
545-6778
Office Hours: Th
10-11 and by appointment
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:
* Weekly responses to the
reading (10%).
Before
each class please post your critical response to the reading in the discussion
forum provided at the course Spark website (http://spark.oit.umass.edu/)
* Regular
and active participation in class discussion (10%)
* Presentation
as a seminar discussion facilitator (30%)
As discussion facilitator, you will place
the week's reading in a larger context.
You may do this in one of two ways. On the one hand, you can discuss the reception of the
text(s) by presenting how the book was reviewed in three different scholarly
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. On the other hand, you can discuss how the text(s) fits
within the historiography of women's history. Starting points for historiographical considerations are
review essays published in the journals listed above, or Nancy Hewitt's edited collection, Companion to
American Women's History. Regardless of which option you choose,
you must make the best case possible for the texts in questions by clearly
summarizing their main arguments and their supporting evidence.
A 6-8 page paper on
the topic of your presentation is due the week after our class discussion so
that you can integrate elements from class discussion, if you so choose.
* Presentation of primary
sources related to weekly topics (30%)
Each week one
student will present a set of primary sources that are relevant to that week's
topic and reading. The goal of this presentation is to think about the evidence
available on this topic and how using primary sources can facilitate engagement
with historical inquiry. Please
think of this in terms of how you would use primary sources to allow students
and colleagues to engage in the kind of historical interpretation and analysis
evident in the week's reading. Your primary sources may be illustrative of
themes in the secondary sources or as an alternative perspective.
Please submit a 4-6
page paper to distribute to the class the week after your presentation.
* Research Prospectus Paper
(30%)
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)
Required:
* Laura Briggs, Reproducing
Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (University of California, 2002)
* Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender,
Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (UNC
Press, 1996)
* Ellen Carol
Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's
Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Cornell, 1999)
* Glenda Gilmore, Gender
and Jim Crow (University of North
Carolina Press, 1996)
* Linda Gordon, The
Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (University of Illinois Press, 2007)
* Margaret
Jacobs, Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879-1934 (Nebraska, 1999)
* Elizabeth
Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History
of a Lesbian Community (Penguin
1994)
* Marla Miller, The
Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (University of Massachusetts Press,
2006).
* Cherrie Moraga
and Gloria Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women
of Color (Kitchen
Table--Women of Color Press; 2nd edition, 1984)
* Annelise
Orleck, Storming Caesar's Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on
Poverty (Beacon Press,
2006)
* Benita Roth, Separate
Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's
Second Wave (Cambridge
University Press, 2003)
* Deborah Gray
White, Aren't I A Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (W. W. Norton, 1999)
* Natasha
Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National
Decline, 1968-1980 (UNC
press, 2007)
Reading: You are
expected to do the assigned reading in advance of each class. A bibliography of recommended reading
is online at the course website.
Course Website: https://spark.oit.umass.edu
Schedule (subject to change)
Reading:
*
Gerda Lerner, "Placing Women in History," Feminist Studies 3 (1975) 5-14.
* Rayna Green, "The Pocahontas
Perplex," Massachusetts Review 27
(1975).
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
Universoty Press, 2006), 23-67.
Reading:
* Marla
Miller, The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution
* 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.
Reading:
* Ellen DuBois, Feminism
and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America,
1848-1869
* Rosalyn Terborg-Penn,
"Discontented Black Feminists: Prelude and Postscript to the Passage of
the Nineteenth Amendment." In Decades of Discontent: The Women's
Movement, 1920-1940, eds. Lois Scharf
and Joan M. Jensen.
* See Beth Behn's prospectus
on Carrie Chapman Catt and the push for the federal woman suffrage amendment in
the History Department office.
Reading:
* Deborah Gray White, Aren't
I A Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South
* Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's
History and the Metalanguage of Race." Signs 17 (Winter 1992): 251-274.
* Bernie Jones, TBA
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.
10/18 The Domestic Empire
Reading:
*
Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and US Imperialism in
Puerto Rico
* Joan W. Scott,
"Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American
Historical Review 91 (December 1986):
1053-1075.
* Amy Kaplan, "Manifest Domesticity:
Where is Guantanamo?," American Quarterly 57 (2005) 831-58.
10/25 Feminism and Native American Women
* Nancy Cott, The
Grounding of Modern Feminism (Yale
1987), 3-10.
* View the films, The Unconquered (1954) and Deliverance (1919)
* Reading To Be Assigned
Reading:
* Linda Gordon, The Moral
Property of Women
* Johanna Schoen, Choice
and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and
Welfare (Excerpt)
Reading:
* Annelise Orleck, Storming
Caesar's Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty
*
Alice Kessler-Harris, "Questions of Equity," in In Pursuit of Equity.
Reading:
* Kennedy,
Elizabeth Lapovsky and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold
: The History of a Lesbian Community
Reading:
* Benita
Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist
Movements in America's Second Wave
* Cherrie
Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color
Reading:
* Natasha Zaretsky, No
Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980