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Women in Search of Utopia This course will explore the ways (primarily) American and (to lesser extent) British and Indian women in the past have analyzed the social construction of gender--particularly as it related to family, politics, work roles, and war--through both their utopian fiction and the actual utopian experiments they designed and ran. Throughout history, writers and designers of utopias have critiqued various aspects of the world around them. Women writers and designers of utopias bring a particular focus to such critiques. They imagine a better world in women's terms and in women's language. They enlist sympathy in the cause of social change by making glaringly evident the meaning of social structures that are so much part and parcel of women's daily routines that they are not normally amenable to critical scrutiny. Equally import, they stress the interaction of individual women and their societies and focus on defining the kinds of broad social structures required to bring about their desired changes. Historical context will be crucial to understanding and analyzing these utopias; we will, therefore, explore the ways in which women's utopian visions changed over time and why they changed over time. Potential reading list Chmielewski, Wendy, et. al., Women
in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States (1993) IF YOU WOULD BE INTERESTED IN TAKING THIS COURSE, SEND ME AN E-MAIL MESSAGE TO THAT EFFECT This page is maintained by Vivian Bruce
Conger, vconger@ithaca.edu |