WMST 231 American Women and Suffrage

This course examines women and their participation and leadership in American suffrage movements, with particular attention to women's creative choices in navigating an oppressive gender system, which denied them the vote prior to 1920. Focus will be on the lives of 19th & 20th century American women, as they experienced the intersectionality of race, class, and gender during the struggle for women's suffrage, beginning in 1848 with the Declaration of Sentiments presented at the first American women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, and ending with the ratification of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. This course will examine how women responded with innovative strategies for living lives of meaning, individually and in familial and community relationships. This course looks more deeply into one aspect of WMST 227 Women in American History: 1880 to the Present.

Credits

1

Prerequisite

Eligible to enroll in ENGL 121

Hours Weekly

1

Course Objectives

1. Identify the responses of American women to an oppressive and unethical gender system as they struggled to claim full citizenship rights.
2. In the context of historical dynamics of power, analyze the values that inspire feminism’s pursuit of equality, how they shape strategies for challenging unequal and unethical structures, and how these values resonate with 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 the responses of American women to an oppressive and unethical gender system as they struggled to claim full citizenship rights.

   Learning Activity Artifact

   • Writing Assignments
   • Analytic paper

   Procedure for Assessing Student Learning

   • Ethics Rubric

   Ethics Goals

   • ET1
2. In the context of historical dynamics of power, analyze the values that inspire feminism’s pursuit of equality, how they shape strategies for challenging unequal and unethical structures, and how these values resonate with 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