History

History 2126 (246) / GSWS 2251: Women in American History, 1600-1900

Reading Guide and Electronic Reserve Reading Links

• Week 1
  • “Women’s History”—“Women History”:  Introduction
  • English and European Heritage:  Gender and Patriarchy
• Week 2
  • The Chesapeake Bay:  White and Black women in a predominantly male society
  • English Women in New England:  Traditional ideas and new circumstances
• Week 3
  • Religious Confrontation (continued) and Social Conflict:  The Salem Witchcraft Episode
  • Discussion:  Colonial Women’s Work and Roles in Northern New England
• Week 4
  • Anglo-American Women during the Revolution and the Early Republic:  “Republican Mothers” and “Republican Wives”
  • Midwifery on the Maine Frontier in the Early Republic:  The Midwife and the Historian
• Week 5
  • Woman’s “Separate Sphere”:  Myths, realities, and historiography
  • The World of Urban, White, Middle-Class Women: Domestic “roles” and fashionable expectations
• Week 6
  • Women’s “Public” Activities:  Education, religion and reform
  • The New England Mill “Girls” Become a Working Class of Women
• Week 7
  • Spring break
  • TBD
• Week 8
  • Native American Women
  • Discussion:  Prostitutes, Business Clerks, and Newspapers:  The changing social, eocnomic, and cultural order in Jacksonian New York City
• Week 9
  • Discussion:  Public Morality, Murder, and Public Opinion:  The double standards of opportunity, reputation, and judicial privilege
  • Black Women in White America:  Slavery and Freedom in the 19th century
• Week 10
  • Discussion:  Black Women, Work, and the Family
  • TBD
• Week 11
  • The “Scribbling Women”:  Women writers on “womanhood”
  • The “Woman Movement”:  The beginnings of white middle-class feminism and “woman’s rights” in the 19th century
• Week 12
  • The Woman Suffrage Movement:  Moderates versus Radical Feminists
  • Working-Class Women in the Garment Industry:  Sexual Harassment, the 1909 Shirtwaist Makers Strike, and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
• Week 13
  • Discussion:  Immigrant Women:  Balancing old-world and new-world expectations of womanhood
  • The “New Woman” and the Public Options for Single Women
• Week 14
  • The “New Woman” (continued):  Continuity and change in perceptions and experiences of girlhood, womanhood, marriage, and sexuality
  • Striving for “Autonomy” in the Early Twentieth Century
• Week 15
  • TBD