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Women, Feminism and History Schedule

Part One: Looking for Women in History

It would be ambitious beyond my daring, I thought, looking about the shelves for books that were not there, to suggest to the students of those famous colleges that they should re-write history, though I own that it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided. . .
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 45.

January 9: Stories We Tell about the Past

Introductory questions to be completed in class.

January 11: What is History?

Reading

Peggy Orenstein, "What's Wrong with Cinderella?" New York Times Magazine, December 24, 2006. ER
Course requirements and policies, schedule, assignments, and resources on website.

January 16: Defining the Past

Reading

Pick one of the historical periods found on the timeline discussed in class on January 11, and read the entries on the topic found in Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica,and the Oxford English Dictionary.

Exercise 1: Definitions - form (due in class & electronically)

You will need your user id and password to fill out the form. Please note that you cannot save the document while you are working. If you need to take a break, please submit and print what you have done, and submit the remaining part separately. You should print two copies to be sure you have one to refer back to when studying for exams. Give the printed exercise to Lori Creed in class. If you prefer, you can work from the text questions listed here, and then paste your answers into the form. Please use this alternative if you cannot access the form.

January 18: Virginia Woolf, Feminism and Women’s History

Reading

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own: 1-40

January 23: History and Memory

Film Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision

Reading

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own: 41-78

January 25: Virginia Woolf at Indiana University

Reading

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own: 79-112
Alice Walker, "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens," ER

Part Two: The Heroic and the Ordinary

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 43.

January 30: Christine de Pizan and the Quest for a Golden Age

Reading

Christine de Pizan,  Book of the City of Ladies, TOC,  Part I, Numbers 1-19,  Part II, Numbers 1-4, 11, 12, 37-46, 53, 54,  Part III, Numbers 1-3, 18-19.ER
Boccacio, Concerning Famous Women, passages
Medieval Women Images, British Library Images from Pizan, Boccaccio

February 1: Who’s Afraid of the Distant Past?

Compare the catalogues of "women in history" found at the following websites with each other and with the inhabitants of Christine de Pizan's City of Ladies. What criteria do they use to decide whom to include?

Other Women's Voices

About.com top 100

Britannica top 300

Exercise 2: Christine de Pizan, Feminism and History

(due in class & electronically)

Electronic Form

Text Only

You will need your user id and password to fill out the form. Please note that you cannot save the document while you are working. If you need to take a break, please submit and print what you have done, and submit the remaining part separately. You should print two copies to be sure you have one to refer back to when studying for exams. Give the printed exercise to Lori Creed in class. If you prefer, you can work from the text questions, and then paste your answers into the form. You may use this alternative if you cannot access the form, but you need to let Lori Creed & Prof. Sword know of your difficulty.

February 6: Shakespeare’s  Sisters

Reading

The Life and Art of Artemisia Gentileschi
Artemisia Gentileschi, Wikipedia
Trial Transcripts, see email from Prof. Sword to link in OnCourse

February 8: The Many Lives of Pocahontas

Reading

Selection from The Writings of John Smith K. Kupperman, ed., 67-73. ER

Pocahontas images, White Watercolors of Roanoke Indians

Optional: Explore Virtual Jamestown

February 13: A Wreath for Aphra Behn

Reading

Anne Bradstreet, "The Prologue" and "On That High and Mighty Princess." ER
Maria Sybilla Merien images (web site link pending)

Exercise 3: Finding Women and Gender in Early Modern History (due in class & electronically)

Electronic Form

Overview and Text

You will need your user id and password to fill out the form. Please note that you cannot save the document while you are working. If you need to take a break, please submit and print what you have done, and submit the remaining part separately. You should print two copies to be sure you have one to refer back to when studying for exams. Give the printed exercise to Lori Creed in class. If you prefer, you can work from the text questions, and then paste your answers into the form. You may use this alternative if you cannot access the form, but you need to let Lori Creed & Prof. Sword know of your difficulty.

February 15: Doing History

Film  A Midwife’s Tale

Reading

Explore dohistory.org, paying particular attention to the primary sources for "One Rape, Two Stories,"

February 20: Do Ordinary Women have a History?

Reading

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: 102-133

Part Three: Revolutions

For women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 87.

February 22: Was there a Revolution for Women?

Reading

Rousseau, Emile, Book V, 321 - 332. ER
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Chapter Two.

February 27: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination

Reading

Eliza Southgate's letters to her cousin Moses Porter ER

Exercise 4: Difference and Equality in the Age of Revolutions (due in class)

March 1: From Abolition to Women's Rights

Reading

Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women's Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870: TBA

March 6: Slaves in the Attic

Reading

Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women's Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870: TBA

March 8: Poster for Women's History Month & Midterm Review

Exercise 5: Chronology of Antislavery and Women's Rights (due in class)

March 10-18: Happy Spring Break!

March 20: Midterm Exam

Part Four: Arguing from History

Professors, schoolmasters, sociologists, clergymen, novelists, essayists, journalists, men who had no qualification save that they were not women, chased my simple and single question – Why are women poor? – until it became fifty questions; until the fifty questions leapt frantically into mid-stream and were carried away.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 28.

March 22:  Socialism, Feminism, and Labor Activism

Reading

Women Working Website Selections TBA

March 27: Street Politics in the Woman Suffrage Movement

Film One Woman, One Vote

Reading

American Memory: Women of Protest Selections TBA
Cartoons (website)

March 29: Anti-suffrage and the New Woman

Reading

Women and Social Movements Website Selections TBA

April 3: When Lovely Women Vote

Reading

Women and Social Movements Website Selections TBA

Exercise 6: Images of Suffrage

April 5: Doldrums?

Film Women of Summer

Reading

Miriam Schneir, Feminism in Our Time: 3-20, 38-67

April 10: Women's Stories and Women's Work

Reading

Miriam Schneir, Feminism in Our Time: 71-124

April 12: Hello, Virginia Slims

Reading

Miriam Schneir, Feminism in Our Time: 125-187

April 17: Civil Rights and the Rebirth of Feminism

Reading

Miriam Schneir, Feminism in Our Time: 201-228, 245-256, 272-326

April 19: Baby Quilts

Reading

Miriam Schneir, Feminism in Our Time: 333-342, 428-438

April 24: Objects and Stories

Exercise 7: Ask Your Mother (due in class)

April 26: Continuity and Change in Women's History

Reading

Peggy Orenstein, Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World
"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately. And I must also consider her – this unknown woman – as the descendant of all those other women whose circumstance I have been glancing at and see what she inherits of their characteristics and restrictions."
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 79.

Thursday May 3, 10:15-12:15: Final Exam