Introduction to Women's Studies

Description: Women's studies is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding, critiquing and discovering the experiences, historical conditions, and concerns of women, both in the present and in the past, primarily but not exclusively in the United States. It is, as well, an investigation into critical thinking about gender.

This course will introduce students to the field of women's studies, the academic manifestation of feminism. Feminism as a practice and a philosophy emerged from the French Revolution in western Europe at the end of the 18th c. and the Civil Rights, Women's movements, and the Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender Rights Movements of the 1960s-1990s in the US. In general, academic feminism seeks to accomplish the following three tasks: 1) to challenge sexist, racist, homophobic and classist stereotypes and representations in order 2) to render unthinkable those ideological systems that hold these oppressions in place, and therefore 3) to transform oppressive institutions from tools of intolerance into peaceful, compassionate, and educational practices. Moreover, because academic feminism is indebted to the larger project of knowledge production, we will also spend time learning about how ideas, knowledges, and belief systems are produced and the effects they have on others.

Focusing mainly on twentieth-century US society, we will examine gender--and its intersection with race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality-- as a category that informs what it means to live an examined life and to participate meaningfully in higher education and citizenship. What does it mean to be a woman or man in American society? How important is gender in determining how you define yourself--as female, as male, as transgendered--and develop as a human being? How has the position of women changed and developed over time? What is the future likely to hold? This class focuses on the experiences of women and the shifting significance of gender in society, providing a multicultural perspective on women and cultural constructions of gender that is often ignored in traditional scholarship. We'll develop a repertory of facts and an academic discourse that will allow us rigorously to investigate how gender identity is constructed by cultural institutions like media, religion, medicine, and law.

Topics will include, but will not be limited to: violence against women,discrimination in the workplace, the feminization of poverty, sexuality, gender and technology. Students will also examine how capitalism, racism, imperialism, and heterosexism affect women's lives. The course will not only provide students with an analysis of women's oppression, but will also suggest activist strategies for ending sexual inequality.

•         To teach and learn about all women's experiences, past and present
•         To sharpen our critical and interpretive skills
•         To value personal experience as a way of knowing, and recognize diversity
•         To be able to situate and analyze the social construction of gender
•         To understand the effects of difference in political and personal contexts
•         To create new knowledge about women
•         To encourage an ability to articulate issues, concepts and concerns
•         To strengthen the links among women and among women's programs
•         To empower women by increasing choices in all women's lives

Feminist Approaches to Theory and Methodology: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Oxford)
Controversy and Coalition: The New Feminist Movement Across Four Decades of Change                 (Routledge)
The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (Penguin)
A Map of Hope: Women's Writing on Human Rights (Rutgers)
Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis (Vintage)
--and readings in the Course-pak (taken, in part, from the Suggested Reading list below)

Films

Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour
Union Maids: A History of women organizing in the 1930s

class participation: 15%
collective presentations and debates: 25%
midterm project: 15%
journal entries: 20%
final project: 25%

Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation (Findlen--Seal Press)
Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women (Beacon)
Mapping The Women's Movement (Threlfall and Rowbotham--Verso)
Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference and Women's Lives (Hennesy and Ingraham--Routledge)
On Call (Jordan--South End Press)
The Sacred Hoop (Allen--Beacon)
Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminst, Doing Feminism (Heywood and Drake--Minnesota)
This Bridge Called My Back (Anzaldua)
Women's America (Kerber and DeHart--Oxford)

Unit I:            Revisiting Political Fields: Philosophy and Praxis from Wollstonecraft to Suffrage
Unit II:           Labor, Feminism and the New Left
Unit III:         Controversies Within and Without: The Second Wave and "Her" Discontents
Unit IV:         Where's the Revolution? Contemporary Struggles