Spring 2005

AMS 370 • Women Radicals and Reformers-W

Course Description

Concentrating on the twentieth century but beginning with eighteenth and nineteenth-century precedents, this course will look at women’s radical activism and traditions of reform through the interdisciplinary lens of American Studies. That is, we will consider women’s radicalism and reform from historical, literary, sociological, journalistic, and artistic perspectives, with plenty of room for students to bring in material of particular interest to them. Topics covered will include campaigns for female education and women’s suffrage; women’s challenges to slavery and lynching; women’s role in socialist and communist movements; feminism (first and second wave); the settlement house movement; labor activism; literary radicalism; the peace movement; ethnic nationalism; women’s liberation; and the new “grrl” power. Throughout, we will consider the ways in which various movements have taken on particularly “feminine” dimensions (that is, how they come to be understood as “women’s” movements); the role of men in “women’s” movements; the dynamics between individual leadership and communal organizing; the impact of race, gender, ethnicity, class, region, and sexuality on women’s individual and collective sensibility; and the variety of ways in which the radical and reform impulses of women and girls have been expressed. Students will actively contribute to course content through research and presentations to the class, and through informed participation in class discussions.

Texts

Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, ed. Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells,1892-1900, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland Paula Rabinowitz and Charlotte Nekola, Writing Red Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism

back