2011-2012 Women's History Courses
Sarah Lawrence’s Women’s History Program immerses students in a combination of historical studies, feminist theory, and gender studies. It also draws extensively upon resources in the social sciences and literature, and on a legacy of continuing activism both within and outside the College community. Students in the program find internship opportunities with such groups as the New York Historical Society, the Tenement Museum, and the Association for Union Democracy. Students also actively promote causes and agendas, including women’s equality and reproductive freedom; prison reform; lesbian, gay, and transgender issues; and HIV/AIDS education. Close interaction with faculty members helps students find direction, chart individual paths to the degree, and research and produce original theses.
This seminar uses feminist film theory to analyze cinema from its silent origins to the present. Gender, class, and race offer contextual ways to look at the representation of women and men in film. The class will explore how film is a unique medium, different from literature, photography, and fine art. We will examine how film can provide a way to look at the history and culture. We will learn how to read films and discuss explicit and implicit meanings embedded in movies. A variety of film genres will be analyzed from the silent screen to classic Hollywood, the woman's film, film noir, auteur film, masculine film, fantasy and horror, feminist film, including gay and documentary works, Afro-American film, and finally, global feminist cinema.
BA, University of Rochester. MFA, MA, PhD, Columbia University. Special interest in US women’s history, history of women in film, history of women’s activism in the 19th and 20th centuries, US and European social history; has worked in television and documentary development. SLC, 2011—
Oral history methodology has moved from a contested approach to studying history to an integral method of learning about the past. This is because oral histories allow us to gain an understanding of past events from a diverse array of vantage points. Methods of recording oral history also allow the possibility of bringing private stories into the public. In contrast, public history in the form of monuments, museums, and World Heritage Sites are consciously preserved in order to emphasize particular aspects of a national, regional, or local past that their protectors deem to be important. Who owns this history? Is it Civil War reenactors, who dedicate their weekends to remembering that war? Is it the African Americans who return to West Africa in search of their African past or the West Africans who want to forget about their slave-trading past? What happens when the methods for interpreting public and oral histories combine? This course places particular attention on the importance of oral history in tracing memories of the past. We will discuss how Africanist and feminist scholars have used oral history to study the history of underrepresented groups. We will also investigate how methods of oral history and public history can be used in reconstructing the local history of our surrounding community (i.e., Yonkers, Bronxville, Westchester County).
BA, Stanford University. MA, PhD, University of California-Los Angeles. Special interests include history of West Africa, particularly Ghana and Nigeria; history of intelligence testing and external examinations in Africa; history of science in Africa; and gender and education. Recipient of a Spencer fellowship and Major Cultures fellowship at Columbia University’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities. SLC, 2001–
The History curriculum covers the globe. Most courses focus on particular regions or nations, but offerings also include courses that transcend geographical boundaries to examine subjects such as African diasporas, Islamic radicalism, or European influences on US intellectual history. Some courses are surveys—of colonial Latin America, for example, or Europe since World War II. Others zero in on more specific topics, such as medieval Christianity, the Cuban revolution, urban poverty and public policy in the United States, or feminist movements and theories. While history seminars center on reading and discussion, many also train students in aspects of the historian’s craft, including archival research, historiographic analysis, and oral history.
This seminar surveys path-breaking studies of US and Global women’s history and related subjects. Course readings, both scholarship and political treatises, exemplify major trends in feminist discourse since the 1960s—from early challenges to androcentric worldviews to the current stress on differences among women. Class discussions range from fundamental questions (e.g., What is feminism? Is “women” a meaningful category?) to theoretical, interpretive, and methodological debates among women’s historians. The course is designed to help advanced students of women’s history clarify research interests by assessing the work of their predecessors. MA candidates will also use the course to define thesis projects.
BA, The College of New Jersey. MA, Sarah Lawrence College. MA, PhD, Columbia University. Special interest in U.S. women’s, urban, 19-century social history, with particular emphasis on New York City, crime and capitalism, and growth of the bourgeois narrative. Contributor to Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia of Women in American History. Awarded Gerda Lerner Prize. SLC, 2007–
The History curriculum covers the globe. Most courses focus on particular regions or nations, but offerings also include courses that transcend geographical boundaries to examine subjects such as African diasporas, Islamic radicalism, or European influences on US intellectual history. Some courses are surveys—of colonial Latin America, for example, or Europe since World War II. Others zero in on more specific topics, such as medieval Christianity, the Cuban revolution, urban poverty and public policy in the United States, or feminist movements and theories. While history seminars center on reading and discussion, many also train students in aspects of the historian’s craft, including archival research, historiographic analysis, and oral history.
The question is: Who Created New York City? The answer is: slaves, immigrants, migrants—its people! This course traces the development of New York City beginning with its first inhabitants, the Lenape. It then follows its growth from a small trading post at the tip of Manhattan into a great commercial and cultural center. With special emphasis on the factors that push people out of one place and pull them into another, what they find when they arrive in their new environments, and how they struggle, negotiate, and figure out how to survive there—including how they exert power and how they deal with power exerted over them—we will explore the social, political, economic, and cultural history of the city through a wide range of readings that include primary source documents and historical scholarship. We will also experience the rhythms of this famous metropolis on its streets, as we attempt to understand the complex relationship between the city’s social history and its built environment through field trips (attendance required). The class focuses on those groups of migrants and immigrants who entered into and lived in the city from the early 1600s to the 1920s. Our historical explorations will provide an understanding of how and why New York City came to be what it is today and how, as a dynamic organism, it continues to change. Although the course covers a particular time period, students may do conference projects that cover years not specifically addressed in the course.
BA, The College of New Jersey. MA, Sarah Lawrence College. MA, PhD, Columbia University. Special interest in U.S. women’s, urban, 19-century social history, with particular emphasis on New York City, crime and capitalism, and growth of the bourgeois narrative. Contributor to Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia of Women in American History. Awarded Gerda Lerner Prize. SLC, 2007–
The History curriculum covers the globe. Most courses focus on particular regions or nations, but offerings also include courses that transcend geographical boundaries to examine subjects such as African diasporas, Islamic radicalism, or European influences on US intellectual history. Some courses are surveys—of colonial Latin America, for example, or Europe since World War II. Others zero in on more specific topics, such as medieval Christianity, the Cuban revolution, urban poverty and public policy in the United States, or feminist movements and theories. While history seminars center on reading and discussion, many also train students in aspects of the historian’s craft, including archival research, historiographic analysis, and oral history.
This course is designed for students who are writing MA theses in women’s and gender history. We will discuss the historiographical dimensions of thesis work; assess various research methods, interpretive models, and theories of history; and grapple with practical questions about writing and documentation. Readings include historical scholarship, theoretical works, and research guides. At critical junctures, students will also read and evaluate each other’s work.
BA, Sarah Lawrence College. MA, PhD, Yale University. Special interest in U.S. labor, women’s, and social history; author, The Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender, and Working Girls’ Clubs; co-author, From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States; contributor to various encyclopedias and anthologies and to educational projects sponsored by labor and community organizations; reviewer for Journal of American History, Journal of Urban History, International Labor and Working Class History, and other historical journals; contributor and editorial associate, Radical History Review; recipient of Hewlett-Mellon grants. SLC, 1988–
The History curriculum covers the globe. Most courses focus on particular regions or nations, but offerings also include courses that transcend geographical boundaries to examine subjects such as African diasporas, Islamic radicalism, or European influences on US intellectual history. Some courses are surveys—of colonial Latin America, for example, or Europe since World War II. Others zero in on more specific topics, such as medieval Christianity, the Cuban revolution, urban poverty and public policy in the United States, or feminist movements and theories. While history seminars center on reading and discussion, many also train students in aspects of the historian’s craft, including archival research, historiographic analysis, and oral history.
The interaction between work and play has taken various forms in history. Our project in this course will be to examine the changes and continuities in the idea of leisure. Beginning in early modern Europe, we will trace the concept up to the present—concentrating on Europe and America and reflecting on subjects such as travel and the pursuit of the exotic, theatricality, consumerism, luxury, and display. In the 19th century, leisure became democratized, and an anxious debate grew louder. What were the implications of making leisure available to masses of people? From romance novels to cheap liquor, from shopping to the cinema, new avenues of leisure aroused both fear and excitement. Moralists felt a need to police both public and private space and to reassert the primacy of work, thrift, and duty. We will study them and the various forms of accommodations and resistance that met their efforts. Class, ethnicity, gender, and geography all acted to structure people’s access to leisure. We will look at struggles over race, gender, and popular culture; the way certain groups became designated as providers of entertainment; or how certain locations were created as places of pleasure. To set the terms of the debate, we will begin with some 18th-century readings about the theatre and the market, the salon and the court. Readings will include work of Montesquieu, Flaubert, Wilde, Wharton, George Eliot, and Fitzgerald. In addition, we will read works of nonfiction that show how leisure helped to create new forms of subjectivity and interiority. Students will be encouraged to work on conference topics linking leisure to a variety of subjects such as childhood and education, the construction of racial identities, or the changing nature of parenthood as birth control became more and more widely available, to name just a few areas. Potentially, this course—through the study of complex oppositions such as need and desire, purpose and aimlessness, the necessary and gratuitous—can give us a sense of the dizzying questions about life’s very meaning that present themselves when we aim at a life of leisure.
BA, Bryn Mawr College. MA, Brown University. PhD, Tufts University. Special interest in modern social and women’s history, with particular emphasis on British and French history. SLC, 1977–
The History curriculum covers the globe. Most courses focus on particular regions or nations, but offerings also include courses that transcend geographical boundaries to examine subjects such as African diasporas, Islamic radicalism, or European influences on US intellectual history. Some courses are surveys—of colonial Latin America, for example, or Europe since World War II. Others zero in on more specific topics, such as medieval Christianity, the Cuban revolution, urban poverty and public policy in the United States, or feminist movements and theories. While history seminars center on reading and discussion, many also train students in aspects of the historian’s craft, including archival research, historiographic analysis, and oral history.
This seminar uses feminist film theory to analyze cinema from its silent origins to the present. Gender, class, and race offer contextual ways to look at the representation of women and men in film. The class will explore how film is a unique medium, different from literature, photography, and fine art. We will examine how film can provide a way to look at the history and culture. We will learn how to read films and discuss explicit and implicit meanings embedded in movies. A variety of film genres will be analyzed from the silent screen to classic Hollywood, the woman's film, film noir, auteur film, masculine film, fantasy and horror, feminist film, including gay and documentary works, Afro-American film, and finally, global feminist cinema.
BA, University of Rochester. MFA, MA, PhD, Columbia University. Special interest in US women’s history, history of women in film, history of women’s activism in the 19th and 20th centuries, US and European social history; has worked in television and documentary development. SLC, 2011—
Moving from 19th-century struggles against slavery to recent uprisings against apartheid and global capitalism, this seminar explores women’s relationships to revolutions that have shaped the modern world. Although the course focuses largely on U.S. history, we will also consider developments in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Topics include the revolutionary work of individuals such as Harriet Tubman, Aleksandra Kollontai, Yuri Kochiyama, Nawal El-Saadawi, Mamphela Ramphele, and Rigoberta Menchu; unsung women’s essential contributions to revolutionary movements around the globe; the ways in which revolutions have addressed—or failed to address—women’s demands for equality and self-determination; and the emergence of independent women’s movements within revolutionary contexts. Reading includes memoir, fiction, and political treatises, as well as historical scholarship.
BA, Sarah Lawrence College. MA, PhD, Yale University. Special interest in U.S. labor, women’s, and social history; author, The Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender, and Working Girls’ Clubs; co-author, From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States; contributor to various encyclopedias and anthologies and to educational projects sponsored by labor and community organizations; reviewer for Journal of American History, Journal of Urban History, International Labor and Working Class History, and other historical journals; contributor and editorial associate, Radical History Review; recipient of Hewlett-Mellon grants. SLC, 1988–
The History curriculum covers the globe. Most courses focus on particular regions or nations, but offerings also include courses that transcend geographical boundaries to examine subjects such as African diasporas, Islamic radicalism, or European influences on US intellectual history. Some courses are surveys—of colonial Latin America, for example, or Europe since World War II. Others zero in on more specific topics, such as medieval Christianity, the Cuban revolution, urban poverty and public policy in the United States, or feminist movements and theories. While history seminars center on reading and discussion, many also train students in aspects of the historian’s craft, including archival research, historiographic analysis, and oral history.
This course is designed for students who are writing MA theses in women’s and gender history. We will discuss the historiographical dimensions of thesis work; assess various research methods, interpretive models, and theories of history; and grapple with practical questions about writing and documentation. Readings include historical scholarship, theoretical works, and research guides. At critical junctures, students will also read and evaluate each other’s work.
BA, Sarah Lawrence College. MA, PhD, Yale University. Special interest in U.S. labor, women’s, and social history; author, The Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender, and Working Girls’ Clubs; co-author, From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States; contributor to various encyclopedias and anthologies and to educational projects sponsored by labor and community organizations; reviewer for Journal of American History, Journal of Urban History, International Labor and Working Class History, and other historical journals; contributor and editorial associate, Radical History Review; recipient of Hewlett-Mellon grants. SLC, 1988–
The History curriculum covers the globe. Most courses focus on particular regions or nations, but offerings also include courses that transcend geographical boundaries to examine subjects such as African diasporas, Islamic radicalism, or European influences on US intellectual history. Some courses are surveys—of colonial Latin America, for example, or Europe since World War II. Others zero in on more specific topics, such as medieval Christianity, the Cuban revolution, urban poverty and public policy in the United States, or feminist movements and theories. While history seminars center on reading and discussion, many also train students in aspects of the historian’s craft, including archival research, historiographic analysis, and oral history.
This seminar surveys path-breaking studies of US and Global women’s history and related subjects. Course readings, both scholarship and political treatises, exemplify major trends in feminist discourse since the 1960s—from early challenges to androcentric worldviews to the current stress on differences among women. Class discussions range from fundamental questions (e.g., What is feminism? Is “women” a meaningful category?) to theoretical, interpretive, and methodological debates among women’s historians. The course is designed to help advanced students of women’s history clarify research interests by assessing the work of their predecessors. MA candidates will also use the course to define thesis projects.
BA, The College of New Jersey. MA, Sarah Lawrence College. MA, PhD, Columbia University. Special interest in U.S. women’s, urban, 19-century social history, with particular emphasis on New York City, crime and capitalism, and growth of the bourgeois narrative. Contributor to Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia of Women in American History. Awarded Gerda Lerner Prize. SLC, 2007–
The History curriculum covers the globe. Most courses focus on particular regions or nations, but offerings also include courses that transcend geographical boundaries to examine subjects such as African diasporas, Islamic radicalism, or European influences on US intellectual history. Some courses are surveys—of colonial Latin America, for example, or Europe since World War II. Others zero in on more specific topics, such as medieval Christianity, the Cuban revolution, urban poverty and public policy in the United States, or feminist movements and theories. While history seminars center on reading and discussion, many also train students in aspects of the historian’s craft, including archival research, historiographic analysis, and oral history.
Leisure and Danger
The interaction between work and play has taken various forms in history. Our project in this course will be to examine the changes and continuities in the idea of leisure. Beginning in early modern Europe, we will trace the concept up to the present—concentrating on Europe and America and reflecting on subjects such as travel and the pursuit of the exotic, theatricality, consumerism, luxury, and display. In the 19th century, leisure became democratized, and an anxious debate grew louder. What were the implications of making leisure available to masses of people? From romance novels to cheap liquor, from shopping to the cinema, new avenues of leisure aroused both fear and excitement. Moralists felt a need to police both public and private space and to reassert the primacy of work, thrift, and duty. We will study them and the various forms of accommodations and resistance that met their efforts. Class, ethnicity, gender, and geography all acted to structure people’s access to leisure. We will look at struggles over race, gender, and popular culture; the way certain groups became designated as providers of entertainment; or how certain locations were created as places of pleasure. To set the terms of the debate, we will begin with some 18th-century readings about the theatre and the market, the salon and the court. Readings will include work of Montesquieu, Flaubert, Wilde, Wharton, George Eliot, and Fitzgerald. In addition, we will read works of nonfiction that show how leisure helped to create new forms of subjectivity and interiority. Students will be encouraged to work on conference topics linking leisure to a variety of subjects such as childhood and education, the construction of racial identities, or the changing nature of parenthood as birth control became more and more widely available, to name just a few areas. Potentially, this course—through the study of complex oppositions such as need and desire, purpose and aimlessness, the necessary and gratuitous—can give us a sense of the dizzying questions about life’s very meaning that present themselves when we aim at a life of leisure.
Public Stories, Private Lives: Methods of Oral History
Oral history methodology has moved from a contested approach to studying history to an integral method of learning about the past. This is because oral histories allow us to gain an understanding of past events from a diverse array of vantage points. Methods of recording oral history also allow the possibility of bringing private stories into the public. In contrast, public history in the form of monuments, museums, and World Heritage Sites are consciously preserved in order to emphasize particular aspects of a national, regional, or local past that their protectors deem to be important. Who owns this history? Is it Civil War reenactors, who dedicate their weekends to remembering that war? Is it the African Americans who return to West Africa in search of their African past or the West Africans who want to forget about their slave-trading past? What happens when the methods for interpreting public and oral histories combine? This course places particular attention on the importance of oral history in tracing memories of the past. We will discuss how Africanist and feminist scholars have used oral history to study the history of underrepresented groups. We will also investigate how methods of oral history and public history can be used in reconstructing the local history of our surrounding community (i.e., Yonkers, Bronxville, Westchester County).
In/Migration: How Immigrants and Migrants Changed New York City From a Small Trading Post to an Emerging World Metropolis
The question is: Who Created New York City? The answer is: slaves, immigrants, migrants—its people! This course traces the development of New York City beginning with its first inhabitants, the Lenape. It then follows its growth from a small trading post at the tip of Manhattan into a great commercial and cultural center. With special emphasis on the factors that push people out of one place and pull them into another, what they find when they arrive in their new environments, and how they struggle, negotiate, and figure out how to survive there—including how they exert power and how they deal with power exerted over them—we will explore the social, political, economic, and cultural history of the city through a wide range of readings that include primary source documents and historical scholarship. We will also experience the rhythms of this famous metropolis on its streets, as we attempt to understand the complex relationship between the city’s social history and its built environment through field trips (attendance required). The class focuses on those groups of migrants and immigrants who entered into and lived in the city from the early 1600s to the 1920s. Our historical explorations will provide an understanding of how and why New York City came to be what it is today and how, as a dynamic organism, it continues to change. Although the course covers a particular time period, students may do conference projects that cover years not specifically addressed in the course. Open to juniors, seniors and graduate students
Leisure and Danger
The interaction between work and play has taken various forms in history. Our project in this course will be to examine the changes and continuities in the idea of leisure. Beginning in early modern Europe, we will trace the concept up to the present—concentrating on Europe and America and reflecting on subjects such as travel and the pursuit of the exotic, theatricality, consumerism, luxury, and display. In the 19th century, leisure became democratized, and an anxious debate grew louder. What were the implications of making leisure available to masses of people? From romance novels to cheap liquor, from shopping to the cinema, new avenues of leisure aroused both fear and excitement. Moralists felt a need to police both public and private space and to reassert the primacy of work, thrift, and duty. We will study them and the various forms of accommodations and resistance that met their efforts. Class, ethnicity, gender, and geography all acted to structure people’s access to leisure. We will look at struggles over race, gender, and popular culture; the way certain groups became designated as providers of entertainment; or how certain locations were created as places of pleasure. To set the terms of the debate, we will begin with some 18th-century readings about the theatre and the market, the salon and the court. Readings will include work of Montesquieu, Flaubert, Wilde, Wharton, George Eliot, and Fitzgerald. In addition, we will read works of nonfiction that show how leisure helped to create new forms of subjectivity and interiority. Students will be encouraged to work on conference topics linking leisure to a variety of subjects such as childhood and education, the construction of racial identities, or the changing nature of parenthood as birth control became more and more widely available, to name just a few areas. Potentially, this course—through the study of complex oppositions such as need and desire, purpose and aimlessness, the necessary and gratuitous—can give us a sense of the dizzying questions about life’s very meaning that present themselves when we aim at a life of leisure.
Public Stories, Private Lives: Methods of Oral History
Oral history methodology has moved from a contested approach to studying history to an integral method of learning about the past. This is because oral histories allow us to gain an understanding of past events from a diverse array of vantage points. Methods of recording oral history also allow the possibility of bringing private stories into the public. In contrast, public history in the form of monuments, museums, and World Heritage Sites are consciously preserved in order to emphasize particular aspects of a national, regional, or local past that their protectors deem to be important. Who owns this history? Is it Civil War reenactors, who dedicate their weekends to remembering that war? Is it the African Americans who return to West Africa in search of their African past or the West Africans who want to forget about their slave-trading past? What happens when the methods for interpreting public and oral histories combine? This course places particular attention on the importance of oral history in tracing memories of the past. We will discuss how Africanist and feminist scholars have used oral history to study the history of underrepresented groups. We will also investigate how methods of oral history and public history can be used in reconstructing the local history of our surrounding community (i.e., Yonkers, Bronxville, Westchester County).
Women in Film: History and Feminist Film Theory
This seminar uses feminist film theory to analyze cinema from its silent origins to the present. Gender, class, and race offer contextual ways to look at the representation of women and men in film. The class will explore how film is a unique medium, different from literature, photography, and fine art. We will examine how film can provide a way to look at the history and culture. We will learn how to read films and discuss explicit and implicit meanings embedded in movies. A variety of film genres will be analyzed from the silent screen to classic Hollywood, the woman's film, film noir, auteur film, masculine film, fantasy and horror, feminist film, including gay and documentary works, Afro-American film, and finally, global feminist cinema.
Women in Film: History and Feminist Film Theory
This seminar uses feminist film theory to analyze cinema from its silent origins to the present. Gender, class, and race offer contextual ways to look at the representation of women and men in film. The class will explore how film is a unique medium, different from literature, photography, and fine art. We will examine how film can provide a way to look at the history and culture. We will learn how to read films and discuss explicit and implicit meanings embedded in movies. A variety of film genres will be analyzed from the silent screen to classic Hollywood, the woman's film, film noir, auteur film, masculine film, fantasy and horror, feminist film, including gay and documentary works, Afro-American film, and finally, global feminist cinema.
Visions/Revisions: Issues in Women’s History
This seminar surveys path-breaking studies of US and Global women’s history and related subjects. Course readings, both scholarship and political treatises, exemplify major trends in feminist discourse since the 1960s—from early challenges to androcentric worldviews to the current stress on differences among women. Class discussions range from fundamental questions (e.g., What is feminism? Is “women” a meaningful category?) to theoretical, interpretive, and methodological debates among women’s historians. The course is designed to help advanced students of women’s history clarify research interests by assessing the work of their predecessors. MA candidates will also use the course to define thesis projects.
In/Migration: How Immigrants and Migrants Changed New York City From a Small Trading Post to an Emerging World Metropolis
The question is: Who Created New York City? The answer is: slaves, immigrants, migrants—its people! This course traces the development of New York City beginning with its first inhabitants, the Lenape. It then follows its growth from a small trading post at the tip of Manhattan into a great commercial and cultural center. With special emphasis on the factors that push people out of one place and pull them into another, what they find when they arrive in their new environments, and how they struggle, negotiate, and figure out how to survive there—including how they exert power and how they deal with power exerted over them—we will explore the social, political, economic, and cultural history of the city through a wide range of readings that include primary source documents and historical scholarship. We will also experience the rhythms of this famous metropolis on its streets, as we attempt to understand the complex relationship between the city’s social history and its built environment through field trips (attendance required). The class focuses on those groups of migrants and immigrants who entered into and lived in the city from the early 1600s to the 1920s. Our historical explorations will provide an understanding of how and why New York City came to be what it is today and how, as a dynamic organism, it continues to change. Although the course covers a particular time period, students may do conference projects that cover years not specifically addressed in the course. Open to juniors, seniors and graduate students
Thesis Seminar in Women’s and Gender History
This course is designed for students who are writing MA theses in women’s and gender history. We will discuss the historiographical dimensions of thesis work; assess various research methods, interpretive models, and theories of history; and grapple with practical questions about writing and documentation. Readings include historical scholarship, theoretical works, and research guides. At critical junctures, students will also read and evaluate each other’s work.



