Women and the Making of Modernity
Term:
Fall 2011
Subject Code:
GLIB
Course Number:
5826
This course examines the ambitions, struggles, and achievements of a group
of Western women intellectuals that produced new knowledge that contributed to
modern understanding. We begin with the pre-Enlightenment “
Querelle des Femmes” which polarized responses to historical
misogyny, Poullain de la Barre’s Cartesian argument that “the mind has no sex,”
and the erratic diffusion of the idea of the “equality of the sexes.” We
consider the explosion of print culture, the gendering of genre, and the publication
success of fledgling female writers for a new audience of female readers. We
study the emergence of Enlightenment feminists like Marie Madeleine Jodin, Mary
Wollstonecraft, and Mary Hays who interrogated the conversations of “canonical
forefathers” on the subjects of virtue, power, and authority. We trace the ways
Enlightenment feminisms were central to the “Revolution Debate” after 1789, and
the gender conservatism that followed. We investigate the careers of Nineteenth
Century public female intellectuals in light of emerging academic cultures of
teaching and learning; the explosion of Science –including astronomy, birth
control technology, and photography, and the impact of these innovations on
gender dynamics. We investigate current perspectives on the silences and
dialogues between male thinkers – Rousseau, Kant, Godwin, Nietzsche – and their
female contemporaries. We celebrate the accomplishments of pioneering women,
including Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, Anna Jameson, Hertha Ayerton, Marie
Curie, and others. We assess women’s proposals for female education in light of
their own experiences as autodidacts and amid pervasive social anxiety about
learned women. We ask what opportunities did women create for themselves? Have
these endured?
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