HIST 2506A: Introduction to Women’s and Gender History
HIST 2506A: Introduction to Women’s and Gender History
Fall 2025
This course asks how did women make history and how does history make gender?
We will revisit major historical events including the transatlantic slave trade, the French Revolution, the Industrial revolution and the Reformation. What did women do, how did women’s lives change, and how did ideas about gender change in the course of that history? We will look at enslaved women who toiled and created cultures of resistance. We will look at the women who enslaved other women. How does understanding the profound differences among those women reshape our understanding of history? And what of the women who broke social conventions — the women who loved and had sex with women, the women who took to the streets to demand the vote, who escaped slavery, who resisted the Shoah, and who participated in riots and revolutions? How can we understand the past by closely attending to their actions and their words?
This course will offer a broad perspective on how women and men have negotiated their gendered subjectivity from the early modern period to the twentieth century. We will consider how gender has been constructed and deployed in relation to other categories including class, race, and sexuality. The course will primarily focus on Europe and North America with attention to a wider, transnational perspective. Themes will include women’s work; transatlantic slavery; women and religious change; the struggle for political representation in transnational contexts; the role of women in war; and feminist organizing in comparative perspective.
Class will meet twice weekly for one and a half hours. Students are expected to read an assigned article before class, to attend the lecture, participate in class discussions, submit short writing assignments in class, and complete a research essay. Readings will include scholarly articles, book chapters, and primary sources. There are no course materials for purchase. All required readings are on Brightspace.
Graded work includes a short answer submitted at the end of every class to an assigned question, an essay due during the semester, a final presentation on a topic of choice and a final essay that answers questions about the course reading and lectures.
Questions: email pamela.walker@carleton.ca