Revolutionary Women

Catalog description

Women across lines of race, class, and national borders have always been at the forefront of social protest and political revolution. This fact, however, seems lost on the news media and even history textbooks, all of which tend to treat women's activism as limited exclusively to so-called "women's issues". This approach implies a specific imaginary of what a woman is and should be and "overlooks not just women's contributions to political change, but also how much of women-oriented activism is scaffolded upon networks first developed fighting on other fronts. Many leaders of the US women's suffrage movement were first active in abolitionism, and before Margaret Sanger agitated for birth control, she was agitating for workers' rights in mill strikes. While the media has largely turned a blind eye, women have rallied for civil rights and democracy and against colonialism and dictatorships. This course seeks to situate such women in history, approaching them in a critical rather than hagiographic manner, analyzing their contexts, words, actions, and afterlives. Over the course of the semester, we will analyze how women's roles in social movements were shaped not only by gender, but also by race and class. We will also address how these women have come to be represented--or not--in our collective memory and how their respective social contexts relate to this representation. We will analyze and critique journalism, political cartoons, advertisements, fictional depictions, and new media sources such as social media posts. Movements we will study include abolitionism, the international labor movement, the American civil rights movement, and global decolonial movements through critical frameworks informed by thinkers such as Jennifer Nash, Stuart Hall, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Nancy J. Peterson.