Explores American women's diverse experiences from pre-Columbian times to 1890, as they re-envisioned their place within families and communities, entered wage work, and struggled for rights. Emphasizes women's self-representation in writing and the visual arts, as well as gender's intersections with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, regional, religious, and other identities.

Explores the writings and cultural contexts of literature by and about women from the 19th century to the present. Features novels, short stories, speeches, poems, and plays. Selected topics may include: education, friendship, sexuality, the marriage plot, labor, and protest and politics.

This course examines the historical journey of black lived experiences of the various eras, theories, and social movements of black women activism, anti-lynching, civil rights, black power, feminism-womanism, to the #MeToo. We examine how black women have shaped and reshaped black feminism. From Jane Crow, bell hooks, Beyoncé to Laverne Cox they challenged inequality and injustices with race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Introduces questions of how politics is gendered, and how gender is political. Explores the development of the contemporary feminist movement; what masculinity means today; how transgender politics have uprooted traditional understandings of gender; why marriage equality has come to define gay rights; how race and class are relevant to gender; and the possibility of gender equality in the United States.

Focuses on what C.W. Mills refers to as the "sociological imagination" in the poetry and memoirs/autobiographies of several contemporary political poets from a range of racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds. Examines how social location shapes writers' approaches to social problems. Considers solutions writers offer and analyzes their role in society as conscience, scribe, witness, and storyteller.

Consent of instructor required.