Seeking Women’s Rights: Colonial Period to the Civil War
Examine the history of women's work and their struggles for individual rights in Colonial America in this first part of the Women Have Always Worked series.
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Course Description
- Explore the evolution and impact of women's history as an academic field and its influence on broader historical studies.
- Dive deep into the experiences and struggles of women in Colonial America, including the lives of enslaved women, indentured servants, and rural housewives.
- Trace the migration of women from home settings to the workplace during the industrial era and assess its effects on family dynamics and power structures.
- Examine the cultural norms, ideologies, and customs that governed women's lives in Colonial America and the early 19th Century.
This is the first of four courses in the Women Have Always Worked series:
- Seeking Women’s Rights: Colonial Period to the Civil War
- Wage Work for Women Citizens: 1870–1920
- Negotiating a Changing World: 1920-1950
- Fighting for Equality: 1950-2018
Course Prerequisites
Recommended for those with an undergraduate level interest in history, labor, and gender.
What You Will Learn
By the end of this course, learners will be able to:
Articulate the significance and evolution of women's history as an academic field, while understanding the interplay of race, class, and gender in shaping women's roles.
Analyze the institutions, practices, and ideologies that dictated gender dynamics in Colonial America, and assess women's influence on pivotal events like the American Revolution.
Trace the development and impact of the independent women's rights movement in the U.S., and comprehend the origins and implications of concepts like separate spheres and domesticity.
Evaluate the implications of women's transition into paid work on family structures, power dynamics, and women's political organization.
Course Outline
Module 1: Why women's history?
Module 2: God, king, and power in Colonial America
Module 3: Separate spheres in the early republic
Module 4: Women's politics in the early republic
Module 5: Creating a female labor force
Instructors
Alice Kessler-Harris is R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History Emerita at Columbia University where she was also Professor in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Professor Kessler-Harris specializes in the history of American labor and 20th-century social policy. Her books include In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (2001), which won the Bancroft, Taft, Joan Kelly, and Herbert Hoover prizes; Gendering Labor History (2007), which contains her essays on women, work and social policy, the recently re-issued A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (1990), and A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (2012). She is perhaps best known for the classic Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (1982, 2001). This course is based in part on the second edition of Kessler-Harris’ 1981 book, Women Have Always Worked: A Concise History, published in 2018. Professor Kessler-Harris is past president of the Organization of American Historians, the Labor and Working Class History Association, and the American Studies Association. Currently, she serves as Vice President of the Society of American Historians. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Nick Juravich earned his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2017 and currently serves as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Women's History at New-York Historical Society. Beginning in September 2019, he will be an assistant professor of public and labor history at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Nick's first book, The Work of Education: Community-Based Educators in Schools, Communities, and the Labor Movement is under advance contract with University of Illinois Press in the Working Class in American History series. Nick is a trained oral history researcher and first interviewed Professor Kessler-Harris for the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia's 25th Anniversary Oral History Project.
Please note that there are no instructors or course assistants actively monitoring this course.