Visions/Revisions: Issues in Women’s History. Ms. Sizer, Ms. Cheng

This yearlong course surveys path-breaking studies of U.S. women’s history and related subjects, including women’s lives beyond the United States. Course readings, both scholarship and political treatises, exemplify major trends in feminist discourse since the 1960s, from early challenges to andro-centric worldviews to the current stress on differences among women. Class discussions will range from fundamental questions—What is feminism? Is “women” a meaningful category?—to theoretical, interpretive, and methodological debates among women’s historians. The course is designed to help advanced students of women’s historyto clarify research interests by assessing the work of their predecessors. M.A. candidates will also use the course to define thesis projects.

Sisters in Struggle: Women and U.S. Social Movements in the Twentieth Century. Ms. Reynolds

From kitchen tables to assembly lines, from legislative podiums to sidewalk soapboxes, women have demanded dignity and respect for themselves, their families, and their communities. This course traces the history of such mobilizations in the twentieth-century United States, focusing especially on moments that can illuminate the gender dynamics of epic contests over class, race, and empire. We will explore the many varieties of women’s work for labor and civil rights movements; the multiple ways in which women have constructed activist identities; competing definitions of women’s liberation, women’s issues, and women’s rights; and their activism’s impacts on personal relationships and family life as well as national and international politics. Readings and materials include oral history, fiction, film, and autobiography, in addition to historical scholarship.

Gender and Power in the “Muslim” World. Ms. Rouse

When gender in the Muslim world is the object of our scrutiny, invariably the emphasis is on women’s subordination to men. “Gender” then is frequently used interchangeably with “women” rather than with both sexes; and both (Muslim) men and women tend to be located outside history, in some eternal state of being. Colonial authors, mass media analysts, regimes and political parties of the left and right (within the Muslim world and external to it), and many feminists, all contribute to this rather limited vision. We will start with an analysis of the various reasons for existing biases with regard to thinking about gender in the “Muslim” world, whereby gender is “naturalized” rather than historicized. We will look at the semiotics of gender historically and in the contemporary moment, and, by examining its implications for notions of “Muslim” men and women, masculinity, and femininity, we will strive to arrive at a different sensibility and methodology regarding the realities of gender and power. Contrary to conventional approaches, we will deploy historical, comparative, and social constructivist approaches to understanding the phenomena under study. In other words, rather than adopting an essentialist approach to relations of gender and power, we will attempt to situate these practices in context. The intent is to see how power is deployed in the very manner in which gender in the Middle East is represented. We will turn from an examination of the semiotics of gender to the historical processes through which the current engendering of social relations and hierarchies between the sexes has been reproduced, challenged, transgressed, and transformed. In the process, we will attempt to generate a more complex and nuanced understanding, one that is attentive to ambiguities and contradictions. Given the limitations of existing literature on the topic, our analysis is not intended to be a comprehensive accounting of gendered lives and struggles in the geographical spaces under study. Instead, we will attempt to address a number of questions such as, what are the different conceptual frameworks that inform our perceptions of gender in North Africa and West Asia? What politics and histories are embedded in different “ways of seeing”? What are the various discursive and material forces that inform men’s and women’s lives in the places under scrutiny, and how do they serve to privilege men over women; how does class play into the social relations between the sexes; what constitutes the “good” man and/or woman at different historical periods? How do different institutions of state and civil society provide openings for resistance to the status quo? How do colonial moments and those of war change the dynamics regarding gender and power? What new forms of knowledge are being produced that challenge and contest existing ideas and realities on the ground? Our exploration of these questions will be framed by different theoretical concerns such as those of feminist and postcolonial thought and those of political economy. We will draw on scholarly, literary, and visual materials. Students will be encouraged to undertake theoretical research on the topic that relies on primary sources.

The Caribbean and the Atlantic World. Ms. Zimmermann

The Caribbean is Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico—and it is also Venezuela, eighteenth-century New Orleans, the coastal areas of Central America settled by runaway and shipwrecked slaves, and south Florida. The Caribbean speaks Spanish, English, Creole, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Papamiento, and Miskitu. It is an area of tremendous diversity but linked by common experiences of African slavery, colonial domination, underdevelopment, nationalism, and revolution. This course examines the history and culture of the Caribbean, from 1492 to the present, with special emphasis on its place in the world: a source of unprecedented wealth built by the labor of enslaved Africans; a hot spot of international competition, piracy, and war; a crossroads of goods, ideas, and people; and in the twentieth century, a region struggling to be more than an “American lake.” We will pay particular attention to Haiti and Cuba, whose democratic and socialist revolutions had an impact in the Americas as powerful as the other, better-known “great revolutions” of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. In our study of the ways in which the Caribbean has been connected to other parts of the Atlantic, we will use monographs that represent a variety of different historical methodologies and emphases (social, economic, cultural, Atlantic, environmental, and gender history), as well as primary sources.

Urban Poverty and Public Policy in the United States. Mr. Woodard

Since the United States of America is a rich country and the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation in 1954, many would like to believe that in the United States poverty and school segregation are issues in the distant past. The paradox of American wealth and poverty raises a number of questions. What is the extent of inequality in America’s schools? What is the history of America’s poor? What has been the public policy on urban poverty through the years? Have there been any major changes in economic hardship over time? What is the poorhouse and what is its legacy in our nation’s welfare system? Has there always been a housing crisis in Manhattan? What was the nature of the urban crisis in the aftermath of the Second World War? And what did the Great Society and the war on poverty do to solve it? This seminar explores the dynamics of capitalism in cities with merchant, industrial, and postindustrial economies; it investigates the nature of immigration, class formation, social reformers and political bosses, ethnic and race relations, slums and ghettos, work and residence, opportunity structures and social mobility, corporate investment strategies and federal urban renewal policies, as well as poverty and welfare. Students will pay special attention to the relationship of ideas and institutions in the rise of schools, prisons, and asylums in urban America. What is the meaning of blackness and whiteness in the United States? And why does that matter? Finally, what is the impact of the economic degradation of poor people on American citizenship in general? What is the price of citizenship in the era of globalization?.

Effort, Merit, Privilege. Ms. Charles – First semester

This course is a history of ideas and practices connected to the notion of advancement by individual merit rather than inherited status or wealth. This comparatively modern idea is more complex and self-contradictory than it may first appear. We will focus on four historical epochs in which personal merit came increasingly to the fore. The first is the age of the French Revolution and Napoleon. With the cry “the career open to talent” and the abolition of feudal privilege, the revolutionaries helped to further the development of individualism, personal ambition, and self assertion, while at the same time implicating the citizen more and more deeply in the apparatus of the state. The second era will be Britain from 1859 until 1870, from the publication of the Origin of Species, with the anxieties it provoked about the struggle for existence, through the l867 reform bill, enfranchising working men, itself a form of electoral meritocracy, to the education act of l870, setting popular education on its feet as a national project. We will study the right to vote and to get an education as means by which the culture created marks of merit and look at the struggles of those excluded, such as women or the very poor, to find their place. The next period is the aftermath of the American Civil War, from Reconstructionthrough the era of Jim Crow. The slaves now free—what was to become of them? Should they compete in society at large, or was it their lot to be kept permanently in a kind of quasi-slavery? Could they ever hope to vote, own property securely, go to good schools, and reach the level of higher education? The debate over this was almost as fierce as the previous debate on the abolition of slavery. The last period is the aftermath of World War II. The foundation of the welfare state, especially in Britain and America, the coming of the G.I. Bill, the consequences of Brown v. Board of Education, the increasing use of intelligence testing, and the massive entrance of women into paid employment will be studied. The course will address such questions as whether meritocracy is compatible with democracy, whether it is desirable or even possible, and to what extent it can influence ideas about work, social hierarchy, equality, and competition. Conference topics could be drawn from such areas as Victorian Britain, women’s history, and African American history, among others. Authors to be read include Rousseau, Tocqueville, Darwin, Huxley, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. DuBois, among others.

Women in the Black Revolt: The Seminar. Mr. Woodard – Second semester

This seminar explores several historical dimensions of women’s leadership in the black freedom struggle in the United States. Women like Mary Prince and Linda Brent fought American slavery on a number of fronts, resisting their exploitation in production and reproduction, defining the meaning of kinship, creating sisterhood and community, fashioning spiritual movements, and writing narratives as the liberating act of self-definition. Forging their freedom, washer women like Callie House fought for the right to have some pleasure in life; they also led labor battles, initiated general strikes, and mobilized mass movements for reparations. Women like Ida B. Wells led anti-lynching crusades and those like Amy Jacques Garvey sustained Pan-African political movements. Intellectuals like Anna Julia Cooper criticized male chauvinism and challenged patriarchy. Sisters like Vicki Garvin created radical theories and those like Gloria Richardson and Diane Nash mapped strategies for liberation. Sarah Muhammad led the Nation of Islam and Elaine Brown chaired the Black Panther Party. Women like Ella Baker and Septima Clark pioneered the organizing tradition in the Black Revolt, and sisters like Johnnie Tillmon and Ruby Duncan served as the vanguard of the welfare rights movement. Thus, this course examines the lives of a number of those leaders, writers, artists, and intellectuals, including Mary Bethune, Elizabeth Catlett, Anne Moody, Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur.

Global Africa: Theories and Cultures of Diaspora. Ms. Dillard – Second semester

Changes in migration patterns, immigration laws, and refugee policies have meant that Africans are living and working in unexpected places. Studies of the African diaspora used to focus on the dispersion of Africans as a result of the trans-Saharan, transatlantic, and Indian Ocean slave trades. More recent scholarship has focused on new African diasporas: Senegambians in Harlem and Rome, Ghanaians in Germany, Nigerians in Japan. These modern-day dispersals, powered in part by the forces of globalization, demand new levels of analysis by scholars. How have people of African descent ended up settling in places far from their natal homes? How has the concept of an African homeland contributed to the articulation of religious and political movements (Ethiopianism, black power, Rastafarianism, Pan-Africanism) in the diaspora? How have theories about other diasporas (South Asian, Jewish, Chinese, etc.) informed scholarship on the African diaspora? This course will study these new African migrations, as well as revisit the histories of older settlement patterns. Students who have taken courses in Africana Studies, Asian Studies, Global Studies, Latin American Studies, or International Relations are particularly encouraged to apply.