10:10A-12:05P      M        BH235

Topic:  Gender and Revolution from 1776 to 1989
A portion of the above section reserved for majors
Above section meets with AMST G620 and CULS C701

This course will focus on a series of paradoxes.  Why is it that so
many revolutionary movements, while claiming to create completely new
societies, end up replicating within themselves gender-based
inequalities much like those found in the ancient regime?  Why is that
some of the revolutions that have, arguably, done the most in the long
run to shake up patriarchy actually made relatively few or relatively
modest promises to women at their outsets?  And why is it that, while
much of the most exciting scholarship on individual revolutions to be
produced in recent decades has explored issues such as the gendered
dimensions of radical discourse and symbolism, the main models used to
compare revolutions typically pay little attention to gender or
sexuality?  Readings for the course will include essays and books by
social theorists and historians who have written about the problem of
comparing revolutions, monographs on the gendered dimensions of major
events such as the French Revolution of 1789 and the American one of
1776, memoirs and other primary sources (all in English) on the way
women experienced the Chinese and Russian revolutions of the 20th
century, and collections of essays by feminist theorists in various
disciplines that explore new strategies for thinking about how
patriarchies can be challenged by and are sometimes reconstructed in
the aftermaths of periods of upheavals.  The required papers for the
course will include two short essays on specific readings, usually
comparing and contrasting a pair of works or a pair of settings, and
one extended essay that focuses on a
specific theoretical issue or revolution.  This essay will, in most
cases, draw from secondary sources only, but students who wish to
incorporate some discussion of primary sources will be welcome to do
so.