Women’s Movements in Modernty

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

As t-shirts on Paris runways bearing feminist slogans or contemporary demonstrators adorned with pink "pussy hats" or dressed in the red cloaks of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid Tale illustrate, cultural artifacts have played and continue to play a significant role in modern women's movements. This course is designed to unpack the long history of such feminist gestures by grounding itself in a close study of the literature and culture of twentieth-century British feminist movements with special focus on three distinct periods of activism: 1) the suffrage period (1905-1914) when women marched in the streets, smashed windows on Bond Street, and suffered imprisonment in their effort to gain the vote; 2) the interwar, post-franchise period (1918-1939) when organizations such as the Six Point Group turned from the struggle for the vote to address a new set of priorities for women's activism; 3) and the second-wave period from the 1960s and 1970s where renewed efforts to stich the "personal" to the "political" enhanced the public's understanding of the scope of feminist activism. In this seminar, students will explore a range of materials from each of these moments in modern activism and will have access to the rare artifacts emerging from women's movements housed at the Women's Library at the London School of Economics: letters smuggled from prison, women's war-time scrapbooks and diaries, records of interwar feminist groups, second-wave 'zines, and more.