WGST 452
Women in America, 1603-1865
Last Offered Fall 2008
Division II
Cross-listed HIST 452
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Women have always been mothers, wives and daughters; and through much of their history in North America, their relationship to the state has been mediated through men. Their labor, be it in the household, as free wage laborers, farm hands, or slaves, was important both to the development of the American market economy and to the ideology and rhetoric of nationhood. This seminar will explore the significance of the experiences of American women from the colonial era through the Civil War. We will address the impact of slavery on all American women, the role of women during the nineteenth-century period of intense urbanization and industrialization, and the ways in which literacy and artistic culture shaped the way American women portrayed their own lives. Throughout the semester we will read primary documents, both as a class and individually. One goal for students is the ability to read sources critically and to evaluate the role of literacy and writing itself in women’s history. Our inquiry will encompass women in New England, the South and the Hispanic Southwest. As we study works of history, we will also read twentieth-century feminist and race theory to understand the connections between practice and theory, between narrative and argument.