Modern American Women

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Assignments & Grade Distribution:

20%: Critical review of scholarly monograph
50%: Research project & presentation (includes all building-block assignments leading up to completion of 15-20 page research paper)
30%: Class participation (includes short writing assignments, reaction papers, etc. as assigned)

GILMAN REFLECTION "ESSAY"

Form: You are expected to write 2-3 concise and insightful pages reflecting on the Gilman readings. The brevity of this assignment means you cannot to waste critical space on platitudes and form concerns (like transitions, theses, etc.). Get to your points and evidence right away. Remember, this is more of an analytical and provocative journal entry than a traditional essay.
Content: While reading HERLAND and WOMEN AND ECONOMICS, take note of the moments in the texts that raise questions with you and that relate to issues you find important, both to women's history in particular and to societal concerns in general. In writing, and with references to the texts, reflect on the problems and potentials of some of Gilman's SPECIFIC ideas.
Goal: The goal of this assignment is to get you ready to shine in class discussion and to help others do the same. Feel free to incorporate where relevant the writings you completed this past week by Jane Addams and Margaret Sanger; all three women were contemporaries and occupied a range of positions underneath the umbrella of American Progressivism and nascent Feminism.


Book Options for Critical Reviews:

Each student is required to review and critique in writing (5 pages) a scholarly monograph that relates to one of the general topics we will discuss in this course. At our first class meeting, students will choose which text, from the list below, they would like to review. For the most part, the titles are self-explanatory. If you would like to review a book not on this list, please let me know. The following books are available at Dinand Library - get yours today!

Kathleen Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (California, 1991)
Mary Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920 (University of Illinois,
1983)
Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (Basic Books, 1992)
Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class and Gender on an Anglo-Histpanic
Frontiers in the American Southwest, 1880-1940 (Oxford, 1987)
Ellen DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (NYU, 1998)
Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (University of
Minnesota, 1989)
Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbianism in Twentieth-century America (Columbia University, 1991)
Lisa Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870-1930 (Temple, 1990)
Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (UNC, 1996)
Susan Glen, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation
(Cornell, 1990)
Linda Gordon, Pitied but not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Free
Press, 1994)
Jacqueline Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's
Campaign Against Lynching (Columbia, 1979)
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent : The Women's Movement in Black Baptist Churches. 1880-1920 (Harvard, 1993)
Tera Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors in after
the Civil War (Harvard, 1997)
Rebecca Klatch, Women of the New Right (Temple, 1987)
Dolores Janiewski, Sisterhood Denied: Race, gender and Class in a New South
Community (Temple, 1985)
Donald Mathews and Jane DeHart, Sex, Gender and the Politics of the ERA: A State and the Nation (Oxford, 1990)
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (Basic
Books, 1988)
Robert Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Lost Causes (Yale, 1996)
Mary Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los
Angeles Communities (Temple, 1998)
Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-century New York (Temple, 1986)
Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Abortion and Woman's Choice: The State, Sexuality and
Reproductive Freedom (Northeastern University, 1985)
Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed
America (Viking, 2000)
Benson Tong, Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-century San
Francisco (Oklahoma, 1994)
Susan Ware, Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism
(Norton, 1993)
Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: the Leaders of the Women's
Suffrage Movement (Oxford, 1993)