Key Materials:

Course Syllabus, Spring 2009

Guidelines for Annotated Bibliography Assignment

Guidelines for Final Paper

 

Lectures:

Sources of First Wave Feminism (9/12/2009)

The Discovery of First Wave Feminism (9/17/2009)

More Lectures (coming later)

 

Course Reader:

Table of Contents ||download||

I. Introduction: The New Woman in Context (Waters, Isenberg, Patterson) ||download||

Note: These are three book reviews with provide a good overview of some of the key concerns faced by historians of the "New Woman."

II. Representing The New Woman (Berman, Bland, Miller) ||download||

Note: These essays examine the diverse sites in which the identity of the New Woman came to be defined: novels written by men, journals like The Delineator, and sociological studies which lumped all New Women together despite massive differences among them.

III. The New Woman and Politics (Southard and McCammon) ||download||

Note: These essays examine the political motivations and activities of New Women Suffragists at the Federal and State levels, with a speial focus on their use of media and pageant to garner support for women's voting rights. Pay special attention to McCammon's use of data -- she is a historical sociologist.

IV. The New Woman and Race (Hoffert and Caughie) ||download||

Note: These essays examine the role of race in writing the history of women, and the fascinating Modernist politics of "passing" -- passing as an example of the Modernist (and New Woman) ideal of the fluidity of identity. Read together, these two essays examine the ways that New Women reconfigured the category of "race" in their experience, to challenge the idea that race itself was immutable and essential (which was, in turn, a way of challenging the idea that gender was also immutable and essential).

V. The "New Negro Woman" (Tomlinson, Keunz, and Taylor) ||download||

Note: These essays examine the experience of African American women who identified themselves as "New Negro Women," connected to both the "New Woman" and the "New Negro" movements. In the work of Harlem Renaissance novelist Jessie Redmon Fauset and in the activism of Amy Jacques-Garvey, these historians unearth the particular experiences of African American New Women.

VI. The New Woman and Immigration (Chapman, Waldron, Coklin) ||download||

Note: These essays examine New Women as immigrants, drawing from the intercultural experiences of Chinese, Jewish, and French-Canadian women.

VII. The New Woman and Intermarriage (Jacobs, Reed, and Degenhardt) ||download||

Note: These three historians examine the phenomenon of interracial and intercultural marriage among New Women as a way to challenge Victorian norms about race and sexuality.

VIII. The New Woman, Motherhood, and The Family (Freeman, and Seitler) ||download||

Note: The readings for the next three weeks address issues of central concern to the women who identified themselves as New Women: sexual freedom, birth control, childrearing, and the family. How would the family accommodate New Women?

IX. The New Woman and Sex (Faderman, and Taylor) ||download||

Note: And what of those women who, newly able to identify themselves as lesbians, had very different plans for their futures?

X. The New Woman and Her Body (Gilman, Schuster, Tomlinson, and Verbrugge) ||download||

Note: Weren't women simply prisoners of their own, recalcitrant, unchangeable, irrational bodies? Or might New Women be able to change ideas about the female body, or even the female body itself?

XI. The New Woman at Work (Opler, and Lutes) ||download||

Note: These essays examine women in the workplace -- and on strike against working conditions.

XII. The New Woman On/In Film (Parchesky, Abrams, and Orgeron) ||download||

Note: These essays examine the impact of the New Woman on films both as an icon and as a maker of culture, through the study of women's imagines on film and women's fanhood behind the scenes.

The New Woman and Cultural Production (Behind the Scenes) (Oja, and Rauchway) ||download||

Note: These essays examine New Women as playing a key cultural role in the production of Modernist culture -- as mentors and patrons of Modernist music and publishing.

XIV. The New Woman Abroad (Cassidy, and Sasaki) ||download||

Note: These essays examine New Women abroad, as missionaries and as the engineers of empire. We will contrast this with the equally-accurate image of New Women as peacemakers (viz. The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, or WILPF).

 

 

URL: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/389/389Reader.html