week 1
Thinking About Women Thinking
Questions / What is intellectual history about? Who are intellectuals? What (if anything) makes women’s intellectual history distinctive? What makes it possible?
Tuesday, March 30 / Introduction
Thursday, April 1 /
Reading /
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 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, excerpt [1929]. [CP]
Jane Addams, Social Democracy, and Progressive Reform
Tuesday, April 6 /
Thursday, April 8 /
Reading / Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics
Reading and Discussion Questions about Democracy and Social Ethics
Outline and Key Terms for Week 2
Check out the material on Addams’ life and ideas at the Dead Sociologists' Society website
Recommended additional readings by and on Addams
Jane Addams, “Why Women Should Vote”
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 3
Zora Neale Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Folklore of Race
Tuesday, April 13 /
Thursday, April 15 / You must let me know who the subject of your intellectual biography will be.
Reading / Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Outline and Key Terms for Week 3
Check out this website on Harlem, 1900-1940
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).
Margaret Mead, Cultural Relativism, and the Science of Anthropology
Tuesday, April 20 /
Thursday, April 22 /
Reading / Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, Foreword, Chapters 1-3, 5, 7, 10-11, 13-14, appendix 2.
Reading and Discussion Questions about Coming of Age in Samoa
Check out the Library of Congress online exhibit, “Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture”
Check out the website of the Institute for Intercultural Studies, founded by Mead in 1944
film: “Margaret Mead: The Observer Observed” (to be seen in class)
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).
Rachel Carson, the Naturalist Tradition, and Environmentalism
Tuesday, April 27 / Turn in one paragraph stating the significance of your subject and formulating two or three questions about her that you plan to pursue. I would also like a bibliography consisting of 6-8 items (articles, films, books, etc.)
Thursday, April 29 /
Reading / Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Chapters 1-10, 12, 17.
Reading and Discussion Questions about Silent Spring
Outline and Key Terms for Week 5
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).
Check out RachelCarson.org
Angela Davis, the 1960s, and the Making of a Revolutionary Intellectual
Tuesday, May 4 /
Thursday, May 6 /
Reading / Joy James, ed., The Angela Davis Reader
Please read the following selections (approximately 130 pages):
excerpts from Davis, An Autobiography
“Reflections on the Black Woman’s role in the Community of Slaves”
“JoAnne Little: The Dialectics of Rape”
“Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation”
“Black Women and the Academy”
“Meditations on the Legacy of Malcolm X”
“Black Nationalism: The Sixties and the Nineties”
“Coalition Building Among People of Color: A Discussion with Angela Y. Davis and Elizabeth Martinez”
“Reflections on Race, Class, and Gender in the USA”
Appendix: Opening Defense Statement, March 29, 1972
Reading and Discussion
Questions about The Angela Davis Reader
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).
Check out the Angela Davis Page
Inventing a Feminist Intellectual Tradition
Tuesday, May 11 /
Thursday, May 13 /
Reading /
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]
Check out the following two feminist theory websites
Women’s and Gender Studies as an Intellectual and Political Enterprise: Critique, Evolution, Backlash
Tuesday, May 18 /
Thursday, May 20 /
Reading /
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).
Group Presentations
Tuesday, May 25 /
Politics: 8:30 - 9:10
Alisha Babb, Eleanor Roosevelt
Haripurkh Khalsa: Madeline Albright
Margaret McGlinn: Florence Kelley
Vanessa Tharp: Alice Paul
Literature, Art, Youth Culture: 9:10 - 9:50
Laurice Bailey: Sylvia Plath
Stephanie Ludwig: Georgia O'Keefe
Eric Bebernitz: Kathleen Hanna
Montia Leighton: Maya Daren
Thursday, May 27 /
African-American Literature: 8:30 - 9:00
Matt Bradley: Toni Morrison
Whitney Whelan: Toni Morrison
Ashley Griffin: Alice Walker
Education and Academia: 9:05 - 9:50
Susie Goddard: Lynne Cheney
Terry Zimmer: Leslie Silko
Carla Harcleroad: Ruth Benedict
Victoria Rodriguez: feminist pedagogy
Jesse Schumacher: Ayn Rand
Group Presentations
Tuesday, June 1 /
Science: 8:30 - 9:10
Jessica Chappa: Jane Goodall
Elizabeth Shields: Jane Goodall
Christina Turner: Margaret Geller
Melissa Morgan: Mary Baker Eddy
Journalism and Law: 9:10 - 9:50
Jana Maiuri: Anna Louise Strong
Christa Shively: Sandra Day O'Connor
Nick Viles: Edna Taft
Audrey Wolf: Betty Friedan
Thursday, June 3 / Intellectual Biographies due by 5 pm in 321 McKenzie; final exam will be handed out in class.