Making A "Second Sex": Women and Gender in Modern European History

This course deals with the history of European women and gender from the Enlightenment to the present. It will focus on large historical themes and questions, especially shifting constructions of femininity and masculinity. It will begin with an analysis of eighteenth-century philosophies regarding women and gender, and it will move to examinations of specific topics such as industrialization, Victorian femininity, the suffrage movements, gender and the Great War, interwar sexuality, fascism, gender and the Second World War, and the sexual revolution.