Negotiating a Changing World: 1920-1950
Discover the cultural and economic opportunities that emerged for women in the U.S. from the 19th Amendment to World War II, alongside racial, familial, and legal constraints.
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Course Description
- Trace the historical journey of women in America, delving into key events and shifts that shaped their roles in society.
- Understand the significance and implications of the 19th Amendment, analyzing its impact on cultural and economic opportunities for women in the 1920s.
- Examine the challenges and limitations set by racial, familial, and legal structures on women's independence during the early 20th century.
- Assess the transformative role of women during World War II, exploring both the opportunities they seized and the barriers they encountered during the interwar period.
This is the third 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:
Analyze the impact of the 19th Amendment on women's political engagement and the evolution of gender equality perspectives during the 1920s.
Differentiate between the perspectives of equality feminists and social feminists, and understand the historical constraints, like coverture and domesticity, that influenced women's independence.
Assess the economic shifts from the Great Depression through World War II, focusing on women's roles in the workforce, labor movements, and societal perceptions of working mothers and married women.
Examine the post-war dynamics, exploring the challenges women faced in military industries and the societal push for their return to domestic roles as men re-entered the workforce.
Course Outline
Module 11: Towards equality
Module 12: New ambitions, new jobs, and new freedoms for women in the 1920s
Module 13: The New Deal: Social justice and social restrictions for women and families
Module 14: Women of influence
Module 15: Was World War II a watershed? Raising questions of what’s fair for women and men
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.