WMST 230 Women in Colonial Maryland

This course examines women in three major cultures-Native, African, and European--that met and mixed in Colonial America, especially in Maryland. Particular attention is given to women's creative choices in navigating the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and sexuality from the founding of the colony in 1632 to admission to the Union in 1788. Scope will encompass indentured servants, convict bondservants, free laborers, enslaved workers, and indigenous women, and will include women's innovative strategies for living lives of meaning, individually, as well as in familial and community relationships.

Credits

1

Prerequisite

Eligible to enroll in ENGL 121

Hours Weekly

1

Course Objectives

1. Identify discriminatory and unethical prescriptive paradigms for women in the early Chesapeake and organize understanding around the strategies women invented to navigate systems of race, class, gender, and sexuality; recognize the ethical implications of objectifying women.
2. Consider the values prescribed for women and recognize the values Native, African, and European women chose as their own; identify and analyze one’s own core beliefs and values.
3. Analyze and evaluate films about women, using the rubric of woman-as-object vs. woman-as-subject to capture the subjectivity of women as agents of their own lives vs. assumptions about women that treat them as objects incapable of choice.
4. Compare the alternative ethical perspective in the fictional world with one's own ethical perspective.

Course Objectives

1. Identify discriminatory and unethical prescriptive paradigms for women in the early Chesapeake and organize understanding around the strategies women invented to navigate systems of race, class, gender, and sexuality; recognize the ethical implications of objectifying women.

   Learning Activity Artifact

   • Writing Assignments
   • Analytic paper

   Procedure for Assessing Student Learning

   • Ethics Rubric

   Ethics Goals

   • ET1
2. Consider the values prescribed for women and recognize the values Native, African, and European women chose as their own; identify and analyze one’s own core beliefs and values.

   Learning Activity Artifact

   • Writing Assignments
   • Analytic paper

   Procedure for Assessing Student Learning

   • Ethics Rubric

   Ethics Goals

   • ET2
3. Analyze and evaluate films about women, using the rubric of woman-as-object vs. woman-as-subject to capture the subjectivity of women as agents of their own lives vs. assumptions about women that treat them as objects incapable of choice.

   This objective is a course Goal Only

   Learning Activity Artifact

   • Other (please fill out box below)
   • Analysis of Fiction

   Procedure for Assessing Student Learning

   • Other (please fill out box below)
   • Written assignment
4. Compare the alternative ethical perspective in the fictional world with one's own ethical perspective.

   Learning Activity Artifact

   • Writing Assignments

   Procedure for Assessing Student Learning

   • Ethics Rubric

   Ethics Goals

   • ET3