Identifications: You will write short answers (a brief identification of the term, person, or event, followed by a statement of its significance in American women's history) for five of the following (10 points each):

Essays: You will answer two of the following questions in a brief (about 2-3 pp. each) essay (25 points each). Be sure to answer the entire question, and to support your argument with evidence (examples, quotes from lectures or the readings) whereever possible.

1) Discuss the emergence of the New Woman. What qualities defined this role? How did the role relate to women's growing economic power, their newfound political voice, and their increasing social freedoms? From what did these changes result, and how did women use them to assert the values of First Wave feminism?

2) Argue for or against the following statement: As a rule, women had a more difficult time during the Great Depression than men did. In your answer, be sure to address the specific things that shaped women's experiences (such as the kind of labor they did, policies which affected their work status, family patterns, social policies, popular culture, etc.) during the Depression.

3) During World War II, an unprecedented number of women entered factories to take part in the war production necessitated by U.S. involvement in hostilities. Outline the patterns that this participation took. Drawing on both the documentary we viewed in class--The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter--and reading and lecture materials, address the following questions: How did war propaganda films represent women's wartime work in factories? How did the women themselves remember their factory work? Why did so many of the women workers join unions, and what strategies for change did they learn from that experience? What did these women think would become of them after the war, and what did in fact happen?

4) Discuss the ways in which Cold War Consensus politics affected women's opportunities to challenge expectations that they were domestic creatures. How did women learn to challenge these assumptions? What strategies did they adopt, and why?

5) The historical experiences of African-American women have been distinctive among more general American women's history. In part, this is because they have often been involved in twin struggles--the sometimes intertwining struggles against sexism and against racism. Addressing the period after the American Civil War, how have the strategies adopted by African-American women been similar to and different from those adopted by middle-class white women? Be sure to address the Moynihan Report in your discussion.

6) Many women's historians have argued that American feminism "died" after 1919, and only re-emerged in the 1960s. Others, like Nancy Cott, have argued that feminism went underground after the 19th Amendment passed, but that it continued to be an important philosophy for American women throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Drawing on readings and lectures, which argument do you think is most accurate? If you believe it died, then to what do you attribute women's continued pushing for greater equality in the workplace, and even for an Equal Rights Amendment? If you argue that it continued, then why have so many intelligent people argued that it disappeared? What forces worked against women expressing their desires for greater equality in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s?