HISTORY 460/560 III (CRN 35337/35338)
SPRING 2002
AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
TOPIC: WOMEN THINKING
Monday/Wednesday: 10:30 - 11:50 in 260 Condon Hall
Professor Ellen Herman
office: 321 McKenzie Hall
phone number: 346-3118
e-mail address: eherman@darkwing.uoregon.edu
office hours: Monday, 12:00 - 1:00;
Friday, 10:00 - 11:00
This course explores significant themes in twentieth-century intellectual history and cultural life by considering the creative work and life experiences of women who made significant intellectual contributions to American society. We will consider a wide range of work, from politics and social policy to science, literature, education, and gender studies. Some of the women we will study were academic intellectuals with careers in higher education, but many were not. Women thinkers have been social activists, cultural critics, journalists, and creative artists as well as academicians. Many have been more than one of these things.
The course will also explore some basic questions about women thinking. Have women thought differently than men? Have they thought about different things? Was their intellectual labor necessarily marked by their identity as women, and if so, why and how? What historical conditions enabled women to join intellectual communities of various kinds? What conditions made it difficult or impossible? How did patterns of women's thought change over the course of the twentieth century?
The course assumes a basic working knowledge of twentieth-century U.S. history.
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Format: This course will include a few lectures-mostly to provide basic background and context. The emphasis in the course, however, will be on close reading and discussion of primary texts. There will be occasional films. Students are expected to come to class prepared to talk. Active participation is the most important part of the course. Graduate students will meet separately with the instructor, at a time to be arranged. Additional reading and writing will be required.
Writing Requirements: The major assignments will be one 8-10 page essay, and a take-home final exam. The essay will be an intellectual biography of a twentieth-century thinker whose ideas are relevant to the subject areas covered in this course. The choice of who to write about is yours, but you are required consult with the instructor early on in the term for help in selecting an appropriate figure and identifying source material by and/or about her. The final week of the course will be devoted to group presentations of these intellectual biographies, and we may do some work on them in groups. In addition, students are expected to turn in weekly logs consisting of at least one paragraph and several questions about the reading for the week. These logs are due on Monday. They will not be accepted after the week in which they are due.
The final exam will consist of essay questions that integrate major themes from the course as a whole. It will be handed out in class on the last day of class, Wednesday, June 5, and will be due on Monday, June 10.
Lateness Policy: No late assignments will be accepted and no makeup exams will be given. Students who miss deadlines will be given an F for that assignment.
Academic Honesty: If this course is to be a worthwhile educational experience, your work must be original. Plagiarism and other forms of cheating are very serious infractions and will not be permitted. Students who are uncertain about exactly how to cite published, electronic, or other sources should feel free to consult with the instructor. If enough students are interested, there may be a brief essay-writing tutorial during class time before the first essay is due.
Accommodations: If you have a documented disability and anticipate needing accommodations in this course, please arrange to see me soon and request that Disability Services send a letter verifying your disability.
Grading:
attendance and participation: 15%
weekly logs: 15%
essay: 35%
take home final exam: 35%
Books and Required Reading:
The following books are required and have been ordered through the university bookstore. They can also be found on library reserve. Article-length readings can be found in a Course Packet [CP], also on library reserve.
Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (University of Illinois Press, 2002).
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hungry Minds, 2000).
Joy James, ed., The Angela Davis Reader (Blackwell, 1998).
Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation (Harper Trade, 2001).
HIST 460/560 Course Packet [CP]
week 1: Thinking About Women Thinking
April 1, April 3
What is intellectual history about? Who are intellectuals? What makes women's intellectual history distinctive? What makes it possible?
Joel Hughes, "Brain Research Finds Gender Link: Med School Team Discovers Sexes Think Differently"[1995]. [CP]
Lorraine Daston, "The Naturalized Female Intellect" [1992]. [CP]
Virginia Wolf, A Room of One's Own, excerpt [1929]. [CP]
week 2: Making the Company of Educated Women Possible: Schooling and Equality in a Democratic Society
April 8, April 10
Mary Wollstonecraft, "On National Education" in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792]. [CP]
Frances Wright, "Education" in Views of Society and Manners in America [1821]. [CP]
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, part 3, chaps. 8-12 [1840]. [CP]
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, chapter 1 [1869]. [CP]
week 3: Jane Addams, Social Democracy, and Progressive Reform
April 15, April 17
Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics
Check out the material on Addams' life and ideas at the Dead Sociologists' Society web page: http://www.runet.edu/~lridener/DSS/DEADSOC.HTML
recommended additional readings by and on Addams:
Jane Addams, "Why Women Should Vote": http://douglass.speech.nwu.edu/adda_a03.htm
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life (Basic Books, 2002).
Christopher Lasch, ed., The Social Thought of Jane Addams (Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).
Dorothy Ross, "Gendered Social Knowledge: Domestic Discourse, Jane Addams, and the Possibilities of Social Science" and Kathryn Kish Sklar, "Hull-House Maps and Papers: Social Science as Women's Work in the 1890s" in Gender and American Social Science: The Formative Years, ed. Helene Silverberg (Princeton University Press, 1998).
week 4: Zora Neale Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Folklore of Race
April 22, April 24
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Check out this web site on Harlem, 1900-1940: http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/Harlem/index.html
Recommended additional readings by and on Hurston:
Michael Awkward, New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford University Press, 1987).
Alice Walker, ed., I Love Myself When I Am Laughing...and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (Feminist Press, 1979).
week 5: Margaret Mead, Cultural Relativism, and the Science of Anthropology
April 29, May 1
Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa
Check out the Library of Congress online exhibit, "Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture" at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/mead-preview.html
Check out the web site of the Institute for Intercultural Studies, founded by Mead in 1944, at http://www.mead2001.org/aboutus.html
film: "Margaret Mead: The Observer Observed"
recommended additional readings by and on Mead:
Mary Catherine Bateson, With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (William Morrow, 1984).
Hilary Lapsley, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).
Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter, My Earlier Years (William Morrow, 1972).
Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (William Morrow, 1935).
Week 6: Rachel Carson, the Naturalist Tradition, and Environmentalism
May 6, May 8
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
film: "Rachel Carson's Silent Spring"
recommended additional readings by and on Carson:
Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (Oxford University Press, 1961).
Martha Freeman, ed., Always Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964 (Beacon Press, 1995).
Linda Lear, ed., Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (Beacon Press, 1998).
Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (Holt, 1997).
week 7: Angela Davis, the 1960s, and the Making of a Revolutionary Intellectual
May 13, May 15
Joy James, ed., The Angela Davis Reader
audio recording: Angela Davis Speaks, 1971
recommended additional readings by and on Davis:
Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (New York University Press, 2001).
Angela Davis, An Autobiography (Random House, 1974).
Angela Davis, Women, Culture, & Politics (Vintage Books, 1990).
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New Press, 1995).
week 8: Inventing a Feminist Intellectual Tradition
May 20, May 22
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper [1892] . [CP]
Emma Goldman, "The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation" [1906] [CP]
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, introduction [1952]. [CP]
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, excerpt [1963]. [CP]
week 9: Women's and Gender Studies as an Intellectual and Political Enterprise: Critique, Evolution, Backlash
May 27 (Memorial Day Holiday), May 29
Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" [1979]. [CP]
bell hooks, "Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory" [1984]. [CP]
Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" [1986]. [CP]
Gloria Anzaldúa, "La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Toward a New Consciousness" [1987]. [CP]
Harry Brod, "The Case for Men's Studies" [1987]. [CP]
Martha C. Nussbaum, "Women and Cultural Universals" [1999]. [CP]
Christina Hoff Sommers, "The War Against Boys" [2000].[CP]
recommended additional reading:
Marilyn J. Boxer, When Women Ask the Questions: Creating Women's Studies in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (Simon & Schuster, 1994).
Week 10: Student Group Presentations
June 3, June 5
Supplementary Resources for HIST 460/560, Spring 2002, "Women Thinking"
This list is intended as a preliminary guide and supplement to the course readings. It does not include published biographies of intellectuals who may interest you because these are easy to look up in the UO (or any other) library catalog. Please do not hesitate to contact me (by e-mail, phone, or during office hours) if you need additional bibliographic help. The reference librarians in Knight Library are also there to answer any questions you may have about locating relevant materials.
Intellectual History General Reference Materials
Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg, eds., A Companion to American Thought (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995).
John Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 24 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies, 1999).
David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper, eds., The American Intellectual Tradition, 3rd ed., vol. II: 1865 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Intellectual History Newsletter
Women's History General Reference Materials
American Women's History, A Research Guide:
http://frank.mtsu.edu/~kmiddlet/history/women.html
Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary
Women, Science, and Environmentalism
Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (Sierra Club Books, 1990).
Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, ed., History of women in the sciences : readings from Isis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (Harper San Francisco, 1990).
Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (New York: Zed, 1993).
Margaret Rossiter, Women scientists in America : before affirmative action, 1940-1972 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
Women, Politics, and Social Policy
Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Estelle B. Freedman, Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition, 1887-1974 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).
Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997).
Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: the Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1830-1930: http://womhist.binghamton.edu/
The History of Modern Feminism
Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989).
Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left (New York: Random House, 1979).
Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Anchor Books, 1991).
Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (New York: Viking, 2000).
Archives, Papers, and Information About Selected Intellectuals on the Internet
Hannah Arendt: The Library of Congress has digitized its Arendt papers. Available online at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/arendthome.html
Mary McLeod Bethune. Essay about her available online at http://www.usca.sc.edu/aasc/bethune.htm
Pearl Buck: http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/Buck/
Dorothy Day: http://www.catholicworker.org/index.cfm
Emma Goldman Papers. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/
Evelyn Hooker: http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/hooker.html
Jane Jacobs: http://www.people.virginia.edu/~plan303/
Barbara McClintock (The National Library of Medicine has digitized McClintock's papers. Available online at http://www.profiles.nlm.nih.gov/LL/
Toni Morrison: http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/tonimorrison/toni.htm
The Ayn Rand Institute: http://www.aynrand.org/ari_home.html
Materials on American Women and Education
Joyce Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York, Knopf, 1994).
American Women and Education: http://frank.mtsu.edu/~kmiddlet/history/women/wh-educ.html
Essay on Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Feminization of Education: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/WILLA/fall95/DeSimone.html
Rosalind Rosenberg essay on history of co-education: http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/learn/documents/coeducation.htm
Web site on Mary Lion, founder of Mt. Holyoke: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/marylyon/
Website on history of Mt. Holyoke: http://clio.fivecolleges.edu/mhc/stow/index.htm
Sophonisba Breckenridge, Women in Colleges and Universities: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/cool:@field%28DOCID+@lit%28lg5935%29%29
Web site on Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce: http://menolly.lib.uidaho.edu/McBeth/welcome.htm