Gender and Society
Eight week 3 credit hour course
This course is intended to introduce students to central topics and theories in gender studies. During the course of the term students will gain an understanding of the relationships among sex, gender, and society.
This process will involve looking at systems of patriarchy and the origins of feminist movements; cross-cultural and historical perspectives on gender; and social, economic, and political institutions that structure our experiences of sex and gender. Students will be exposed to a range of approaches: they will critically examine these approaches and articulately demonstrate their understanding of the complexities of issues
Psychology of Women
Eight week 3 credit hour course
Psychology of women will be offered in spring 2008. In this course, students will gain a multicultural, global perspective of the psychology of women through the examination of prominent theories and empirical evidence. Students will explore various factors that affect the development of girls and women globally. Areas explored include gender identity and socialization, use of power, communication, intimacy, sexuality, health, work, family, and violence.
US Women’s History
Eight week 3 credit hour course
This course examines the history of women in the United States during the past two-hundred years; while our examination will begin with the colonial period, we will spend most of our time exploring changes over time in the lives of American women during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To facilitate this exploration, we will use power as our primary category of analysis. Power—defined in this course as women’s ability to control the distribution of social resources and, more simply, women’s ability to control their life circumstances—is a useful tool for understanding how women have shaped and been shaped by social, economic, cultural, and political forces and for determining the degree to which women have been able to exercise agency in different arenas and in different historical moments. In particular, power is useful in connecting and illuminating the relationships between women’s experiences in the realms of family, work, and community. Power also clarifies relationships between women and men and deepens our understanding of the extent to which sexual difference has been socially constructed and historically contested. Finally, power highlights relationships among women of different races, classes, ethnicities, religions, and ages. In short, power as an analytic category helps us better to understand what Carolyn Heilbrun terms “gender arrangements in our culture, whether of difference, oppression, or possibility.”
Women and Work
Eight week 3 credit hour course
This eight week 3 credit hour course explores women’s paid and unpaid work in an historical and contemporary context. It also looks at the efforts of women to transform the conditions under which they work. Further, the course pays attention to the impact of globalization on women’s work. Students will be challenged to question why women are paid less than men and why some women are paid less than other women; why women, women of color and immigrant women are overrepresented in certain occupations; and how the formal workplace accommodates (or does not accommodate) homemaking, childcare, and eldercare. Other topics that will be addressed include: low wage work, the professions, sexual harassment, socialization and education leading to occupational opportunities, and women in non-traditional occupations. The course will rely heavily on discussion and consideration of how the academic study of women and work relates to students’ real life experiences.
Women in the Arts
Eight week 3 credit hour course
This course offers an introduction to the significant contributions made by women to the arts- as creators, patrons, and muses – from the Middle Ages to the early 21st century. It will examine the artistic as well as social, political, and economic contexts in and against which women artists had to work and how that context impacted the art they created
