Why didn’t I know that there is a long, rich history of women with politically significant ideas?

Required Reading: Dale Spender, Women of Ideas, “Introduction.” 

Recommended Reading: Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought,“Conclusion.”

For hundreds of years, despite those odds against them, the “wrong” writers still managed to write. How was their work made invisible or insignificant? 

Required Reading: Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing.

Why is so much intellectual energy devoted to disparaging women? How does one construct an alternative? Modelling Self-Authorization.  

Required Reading: Christine de Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies, excerpts. 

Recommended Reading: Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages and The Penguin Book of Witches, excerpts.

Who do we want as foremothers? What are the implications of our choices? Pizan, continued. 

Required Reading:

Marilyn Frye, “Willful Virgin or Do you Have to be a Lesbian to be a Feminist” and

Benjamin Kahan, “The Other Harlem Renaissance: Father Divine, Celibate Economics, and the Making of Black Sexuality.” 

What are the implications of the ideals of the French Revolution for the relations between men and women?

Women, in the main, had been rendered wretched and weak. The antidote required seeking power over themselves rather than over men. 

Required Reading: Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, “Introduction,” chapters 1-4, 6, 9, 11:

http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/wollstonecraft1792.pdf 

Wollstonecraft, continued.  

Required Reading:  Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl” and “House and Home.”

Recommended Reading: Iris Marion Young, “Lived Body vs. Gender” and “Breasted Experience.”

Is it significant that one of Euromodernity’s greatest monsters was created by a 19-year-old pregnant woman?

Why did she reflect on how monsters are created? Did she suggest that the process could be averted? 

Required Reading: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/shelley/mary/s53f/index.html 

Shelley, continued. 

Required Reading:

Julie Wosk, “Simulated Women and the Pygmalion Myth” and “The Woman Artist as Pygmalion”

Elizabeth Young’s Black Frankenstein, “Introduction.” 

Recommended Reading: Elizabeth Young, “Souls on Ice” and Eileen Hunt Botting, “Frankenstein and the Question of Children’s Rights.” 

Possibilities and limitations of interpretation and translation in situations of warfare and conquest. 

Required Reading: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Paiutes: 

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/winnemucca/piutes/piutes.html 

Hopkins, continued. 

Required Reading: Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape, chapters 2 and 5.

Recommended Reading: Lee Maracle, “I Am Woman,” “Law, Politics, Tradition,” and “The Women’s Movement” and interviews with Sarah Deer, Shannon Speed, and Aura Cumes available here: http://www.criticalethnicstudiesjournal.org/blog/ 

How are women turned into slaves? How can they reverse the process? Is there a necessary relationship between the pursuit of freedom and adulthood? 

Required Readings: Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html 

Jacobs, continued. 

Required Reading: Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class, chapter 1 and Women Have Always Worked, chapters 1 and 2.  

How do economic relationships determine the character of relations between the sexes? Can bourgeois women be allies of the liberation of humankind? 

Required Reading: Red Rosa by Kate Evans. 

Rosa, continued. 

Required Reading: “Writings on Women” by Rosa Luxemburg and Women Have Always Worked, chapter 3. 

Recommended Reading: Ruth Milkman, “Women’s Work and Economic Crisis: Some Lessons of the Great Depression” and “Women’s Work and Economic Crisis Revisited: Comparing the Great Depression and the Great Recession.” 

The cause of women’s rights must be won through women’s own efforts. Anarchist Women, Part I: He-Yin Zhen. 

Required Reading: He-Yin Zhen, “On the Question of Women’s Liberation,” “On the Question of Women’s Labor,” and “Economic Revolution and Women’s Revolution.”  

Recommended Reading: He-Yin Zhen, “On the Revenge of Women.”

He-Yin Zhen, continued. 

Required Reading: “On Feminist Antimilitarism,” and “The Feminist Manifesto.” 

The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary. Anarchist Women, Part II: Emma Goldman. 

Required Reading: Emma Goldman, “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” “The Psychology of Political Violence,” “Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty,” and “Woman Suffrage.” https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-anarchism-and-other-essays 

Recommended Reading: Alice Kessler-Harris, “Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and their Union.”

Goldman, continued.  

Required Reading:  Goldman, “The Traffic in Women,” and “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation” and Lori Jo Marso, “A Feminist Search for Love, Emma Goldman on the Politics of Marriage, Love, Sexuality, and the Feminine.”

Recommended Reading: Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys, excerpt and Eleanor Herman, “Power Between the Sheets.” 

“You are not absolutely defenseless. For the torch of the incendiary . . . beyond which they may not venture with impunity, cannot be wrested from you.” Anarchist Women, Part III: Lucy Parsons. 

Required Reading: Gale Ahrens, “Lucy Parsons: Mystery Revolutionist, More Dangerous than a Thousand Rioters,” Lucy Parsons, “The Principles of Anarchism,” “The Negro,” “The Southern Lynchings,” “Are Class Interests Identical,” “The Factory Child,” “Famous Women of History,” “The IWW and the Shorter Workday,” and “I’ll be Damned if I Go Back to Work Under Those Conditions!” and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Afterword.” 

Can you stand in comparative idleness, in purposeless wrangling, when there is earnest, practical, united work to be done? 

Required Reading: Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14975/14975-h/14975-h.htm. 

Recommended Reading: Wells, “Iola’s Southern Field” and “The Requirements of Southern Journalism” and “How Enfranchisement Stops Lynching.”

Women’s interest as every agony that has been dumb. Refusing to pit the advancement of white women over that of people of color. The question of measuring value.  

Required Reading: Anna Julia Cooper, “The Higher Education of Women,” “Woman versus the Indian,” and “What are We Worth?” 

https://docsouth.unc.edu/church/cooper/cooper.html 

Recommended Reading: Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice, chapter 1 and Carolyn G. Heilbrun, “The Hidden River of Androgyny.” 

Enriching the meaning of democracy beyond a narrow focus on the franchise.

Jane Addams, “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” “The Objective Value of a Social Settlement,” “The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement,” “Women’s Conscience and Social Amelioration,” “If Men Were Seeking the Franchise,” and “Women’s Memories—Challenging War.” 

Recommended Reading: Hull-House Maps and Papers by the Residents of Hull-House and Women Have Always Worked, chapter 4. 

Is the category “woman” a deviation relative to a standard that is male? Do women possess desirable characteristics that are fruits of a situation of oppression? Can one be a creator if one is struggling to prove that one is human? 

Required Reading: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, “Introduction,” “Woman’s Situation and Character,” and “Conclusion.” Recommended Reading: Julia de Burgos, Song of the Simple Truth, excerpts. 

Childbirth as a prison from which we might eventually be released? 

Required Reading: Shulamith Firestone, “Down with Childhood,” “Love,” “Feminism and Ecology,” and “Conclusion.”

 Required Readings: Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing and Dale Spender, Women of Ideas, “Introduction” 

Recommended Reading: Penny Weiss, Canon Fodder.

Why is so much energy devoted to the disparaging of women? 

Why are these arguments advanced not only by ordinary, mediocre men, but also by Ovid and Aristotle? What must one do to reveal the fallacies of this misogyny and construct a genuine alternative?  Who do we want as foremothers? What are the implications of our choices? 

Required Reading: Christine de Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Three Writers” 

Recommended Reading: Christine de Pizan, “The Tale of Joan of Arc” and Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages.

Pioneering English Feminists: How are monsters created? How might this process be averted?

What are the implications of the ideals of the French Revolution for the relations between men and women? If women are rendered wretched and weak, “barren bloomings,” isn’t a new conception of female excellence, beyond a tyrannizing artificial weakness, urgently needed? How can women seek power over themselves rather than over men? 

Required Reading: Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (https://www.bartleby.com/144/) and Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl”.

Recommended Reading: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. 

The relationship between national, territorial, legal, and personal sovereignty. What does it mean to end rape? 

Required Reading: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Paiutes: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/winnemucca/piutes/piutes.html and Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape. 

Recommended Reading: Lee Maracle, Bobbie Lee, Indian Rebel and interviews with Aura Cumes, Sarah Deer, and Shannon Speed available here: http://www.criticalethnicstudiesjournal.org/blog/ 

How are women turned into slaves? How can they reverse the process? 

Required Readings: Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html and Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class. Recommended Reading: Patrick Grzanka, Intersectionality: A Foundations and Frontiers Reader and Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment, edited by Carole Boyce Davies. 

A Marxist Turn: Why must one have a special science devoted to understanding the economic relations of human beings? Can bourgeois women really be allies in liberation struggles or are they parasites of the parasites? 

Required Reading: The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, Parts I and II and Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch. 

Recommended Reading: Raya Dunayevskaya, Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution and Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacy of Four Continents.

When Marxism Isn’t Sufficiently Radical? Anarchist Considerations in the U.S. and China.

Required Reading: Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-anarchism-and-other-essays) and He-Yin Zhen, “On the Question of Women’s Liberation,” “On the Question of Women’s Labor,” “Economic Revolution and Women’s Revolution,” “On the Revenge of Women,” “On Feminist Antimilitarism,” and “The Feminist Manifesto”.  

Recommended Reading: Peter Zarrow, “He Zhen and Anarcho-Feminism in China”, selections from Goldman’s Living My Life, and Jane Addams, “Women’s Memories—Challenging War” 

Can you stand in comparative idleness, in purposeless wrangling, when there is earnest, practical, united work to be done?

Women’s interest as every interest that has lacked an interpreter, every agony that has been dumb. Enriching the meaning of democracy beyond the narrow focus on the franchise. The indispensability of humanistic education in the transformation of former slaves and masters into citizens. 

Required Reading: Ida B. Wells, A Red Record (available here:

https://ia800501.us.archive.org/23/items/theredrecord14977gut/14977-8.txt), Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice From the South, parts I and II (https://docsouth.unc.edu/church/cooper/cooper.html) and Jane Addams, “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” “The Objective Value of a Social Settlement,” “The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement,” “The Wrecked Foundations of Domesticity,” and “Women’s Conscience and Social Amelioration”.  Recommended Reading: Jane Addams, “If Men Were Seeking the Franchise” and Iris Marion Young, “House and Home”.

Normal Men Do Not Know That Everything is Possible; The Realms of Labor, Work, and Action. Required Reading: Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism and The Human Condition

Is there an essential content to being a woman?

Is the category “woman” a deviation and peculiarity, the other and relative measure to a standard that is male? What does it mean to claim that one becomes, rather than being born, a woman? Do women possess desirable characteristics (of patience, sympathy, and irony) that are fruits of a situation of oppression? Can one be a creator if one is struggling to prove that one is human? Is mediocrity inevitable in the work of even independent women? 

Required Reading: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Twentieth-and Twenty-first Century Revolutions.  

Required Reading: James and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolution and Evolution In the Twentieth Century and Grace Lee Boggs in The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century. 

Recommended Reading: Grace Lee Boggs, “Women and the Movement to Build a New America”

Shifting the Geographies of Reason. 

Required Reading: Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.  Recommended Reading: Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in the Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project”

Social Contract Refashioned. 

Required Reading: Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract

Recommended Reading: Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex and Power.