Women in World History

(4 Credits)

What makes a woman? What would the history of the world look like through women's eyes? How might such a perspective prompt us to rethink concepts like "work," "politics," "economics," "family," "revolutions," "leadership," "activism," and "periodization" in history? This course will debate answers to these questions by exploring how gender systems, mediated by power relations of class, race, religion, nationality, and sexuality, shaped women's lived experiences in different times and places from 1500 to the present. We will seek the clues to these systems by studying a variety of sources created both by and about women from religion, politics, philosophy, law, science and medicine, and public and popular culture. We will study how ideas about gender traveled, adapted, and sometimes changed through case studies of cross-cultural encounters, empire-building, revolutions, social movements, and economic and technological transformations. And we will evaluate how the rich diversity of women's lives in our collective past, judged by their legal status, family lives, work, and public roles, accommodated or contested these gender norms and expectations. We will conclude with exchanges about the variety of contemporary visions and policy implications of gender justice