Course Description

Required Texts:

• Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
• Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1996).
• Dorothy E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987).
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (New York:  Dover, orig. 1892).
• Electronic readings packet available at the Marriott Reserve Desk

Course Requirements

The two short papers are to focus on an assigned theme in the readings. For the final paper, students will be asked to address the implications of feminist epistemology for feminist pedagogy. While the short papers will focus on three or four readings, the final paper is expected to draw on a much wider distribution of readings. The final paper should be about 12-15 pages in length. All papers are to be typed, double-spaced, and have one-inch margins (for comments). References should be in the format that the student would be most likely to use in a published paper or a thesis.

Week 1     Introduction: Gender Socialization Theorists’ View of Classroom Dynamics
    29 Aug.

• Myra Pollack Sadker and David Miller Sadker, “Sexism in Teacher Education Texts,” Harvard Educational Review 50, no. 1 (February 1980): 36-46.
• Sheila Tobias and Carol Weissbrod, “Anxiety and Mathematics: An Update,” Harvard Educational Review 50, no. 1 (February 1980): 63-70.

Week 2     Gender Difference Theorists’ Views of Morality and Education
    5 Sept.

• Susan Glaspell, “A Jury of Her Peers,” in Images of Women in Literature, ed. Mary Anne Fergusun (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), pp. 370-85.
• Carol Gilligan, “Moral Orientation and Moral Development,” in Women and Moral Theory, ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987), 19-33.
• Carol Gilligan, “In a Different Voice: Women’s Conceptions of the Self and of Morality,” Harvard Educational Review 47, no. 4 (November, 1977): 481-517.
• Betty Bardige, “Things so Finely Human: Moral Sensibilities at Risk in Adolescence,” in Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women’s Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education, ed. Carol Gilligan, Janie Victoria Ward, and Jill McLean Taylor, with Betty Bardige (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 87-110.

• Marilyn Frye, “The Possibility of Feminist Theory,” in Garry and Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality
• bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in Garry and Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality
• Patricia Hill Collins, “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought,” in Garry and Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality
• Angela Davis, “Blame It on the Blues:  Bessie Smith, Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, and the Politics of Blues Protest,” in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism:  Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York:  Pantheon Books, 1998), 91-119.

• Genevieve Lloyd, “The Man of Reason,” in Garry and Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality
• Alison M. Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology,” in Garry and Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality
• Lorraine Code, “Taking Subjectivity into Account,” in Garry and Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality

Week 5     Feminism and Science
    26 Sept.

• Helen Longino, “Can There Be a Feminist Science?” in Garry and Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality
• Lynn Hankinson Nelson, “Who Knows? What Can They Know? And When?” in Garry and Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality
• Sandra Harding, “Feminism, Science, and the Anti-Enlightenment Critiques,” in Garry and Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality
• Evelyn Fox Keller, “A World of Difference,” in Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 158-76.

Week 6     Women’s Life Narratives
    3 Oct.

• Nell Irvin Painter, “Writing Biographies of Women,” Journal of Women’s History 9, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 154-63.
• Shirley J. Yee, “The Inventiveness and Inventedness of Identity Formation in History and Literature,” Journal of Women’s History 10, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 174-82.
• Victoria Bissell Brown, “Biography in the Mother Tongue,” Journal of Women’s History 10, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 198-206.
• Lourdes Torres, “The Construction of the Self in U.S. Latina Autobiographies,” in Garry and Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality
• A children’s picture-book biography, early-reader biography, or chapters from a young adult biography on a North American woman

Week 7     Feminist Standpoint Epistemology, Pt. I
    10 Oct.

• Liz Stanley, “‘A Referral Was Made’: Behind the Scenes during the Creation of a Social Services Department ‘Elderly’ Statistic,” in Feminist Praxis: Research, Theory and Epistemology in Feminist Sociology, ed. Liz Stanley (London: Routledge, 1990), 113-22.
• Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic, pp. 1-104.

Week 8     Feminist Standpoint Epistemology, Pt. II
    17 Oct.

• Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic, pp. 105-226.
• Sherene H. Razack, “Storytelling for Social Change,” in Returning the Gaze:  Essays on Racism, Feminism and Politics, ed. Himani Bannerji (Toronto, ON:  Sister Vision Press, 1993), 83-100.

• Marilyn Frye, “White Woman Feminist,” in Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism, 1976-1992 (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1992), 147-69.
• María Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception,” in Garry and Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality
• Collins, Fighting Words, pp. ix-76.

• Collins, Fighting Words, pp. 79-251
• bell hooks, “Feminism and Black Women’s Studies,” SAGE 6, no. 1 (Summer 1989): 54-56.

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (New York:  Dover, orig. 1892).
• Susan Bordo, “Anorexia Nervosa: Pyschopathology as the Crystallization of Culture,” in Garry and Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality
• Carol Gilligan, “Teaching Shakespeare’s Sister: Notes from the Underground of Female Adolescence,” in Making Connections, ed. Carol Gilligan, Nona P. Lyons, and Trudy J. Hanmer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 6-29.

• Sofia Villenas, “The Colonizer/Colonized Chicana Ethnographer: Identity, Marginalization, and Co-optation in the Field,” Harvard Educational Review 66, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 711-31.
• Dolores Delgado Bernal, “Using a Chicana Feminist Epistemology in Educational Research,” Harvard Educational Review 68, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 555-82.
• Emily Honig, “Striking Lives: Oral History and the Politics of Memory,” Journal of Women’s History 9, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 139-57.
• Irene Ledesma, “Confronting Class: Comment on Honig,” Journal of Women’s History 9, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 158-63.

Week 13     Post-Structuralism and Feminist Epistemology
    21 Nov:

• Alessandra Tanesini, “Whose Language?” in Garry and Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality
• Andrea Nye, “The Voice of the Serpent: French Feminism and the Philosophy of Language,” in Garry and Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality
• Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Garry and Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge, and Reality

• Bronwyn Davies, “The Sense Children Make of Feminist Stories,” in Frogs, Snails and Feminist Tales:  Preschool Children and Gender (Sydney, Australia:  Allen & Unwin, 1989), 43-69.
• Valerie Walkerdine, “Femininity as Performance,” in Schoolgirl Fictions (London:  Verso, 1990), 133-46.
• Mimi Orner, “Interrupting the Calls for Student Voice in ‘Liberatory’ Education:  A Feminist Poststructuralist Perspective,” in Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy, ed. Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore (New York:  Routledge, 1992), 74-89.

• Barbara Blinick, “Out in the Curriculum, Out in the Classroom:  Teaching History and Organizing for Change,” in Tilting the Tower:  Lesbians Teaching Queer Subjects, ed. Linda Garber (New York:  Routledge, 1994), 142-49.
• Barbara Omolade, “A Black Feminist Pedagogy,” in The Rising Song of African American Women (New York:  Routledge, 1994), 129-36.
• Audrey Thompson, “Caring in Context:  The Educational Limitations of Gender Difference Theory,” Curriculum Inquiry (in press).