WOMEN
AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, 1870 TO 1980
This course is specifically designed to teach you to think critically, analytically, and contextually about women's lives between Reconstruction (the period immediately after the Civil War) and the Reagan era. A major focus will be to understand how class, ethnicity, and race influenced American women's work, family life, and organized activities across time. The following topics and themes will be discussed as we build our chronological framework: immigration; industrialization; female sexuality; women and the Depression; women and the war; women and reform, the "feminine mystique"; civil rights; and the women's movement. The course will emphasize diversity and change among various social classes, races, and ethnic groups that comprise our history.
Because I believe strongly in letting women tell their own stories, you will have many opportunities to “hear women’s voices” through letters, diaries, journals, and autobiographies. You will examine what various women say to you about their lives in specific historical contexts
Potential readings
Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
Maxine Honey Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among
Ghosts
Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi
Anzia Yekierska, Bread Givers
Patricia Martin, ed., Songs my Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of
Mexican American Women
Mary Beth Norton and Ruth Alexander, eds., Major Problems in America
Women's History
I will likely put on course reserve a three-hour reading by Maya Angelou
of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
This page is maintained by Vivian Bruce
Conger, vconger@ithaca.edu
This page was last updated on
Saturday, August 30, 2003 11:41 AM