Readings
Hunt, Lynn. The Family Romance of the French Revolution. University of California Press, 1993. ISBN: 9780520082700.
Poovey, Mary. “The Ideological Work of Gender.” Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 1-23. ISBN: 9780226675305.
Pateman, Carole. “‘The Disorder of Women’: Women, Love and the Sense of Justice.” In Devitis, Joseph L. Women, Culture and Morality: Selected Essays. Peter Lang, 1987, pp. 65-90. ISBN: 9780820404479.
Wood, Elizabeth. “Putin and the Façade of Autocracy: Masculinity and Hypermasculinity in a Modern Presidency.” Unpublished manuscript, 2010.
Questions
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Over the last quarter century, many scholars have been attempting to (re)construct the history of gender in the west from the eighteenth century to the present. Based on your reading of this week’s selections from Pateman, Poovey, Hunt, and Wood, what are the contours of this history? What ideologies and material practices might it study, and what is its provisional chronology from ca. 1700 to today?
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All our authors this week are engaged to some extent with Freudian and psychoanalytic analysis, but Lynn Hunt is by far the most explicit in her efforts to adapt these theories to the interpretation of the past. What did you find successful in Hunt’s efforts to apply Freudian cultural theory to an interpretation of the French Revolution? What aspects of the use of Freudianism were less convincing in your mind?
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One of our goals this term is to learn how to provide colleagues with useful feedback on work in progress. Elizabeth Wood has very graciously agreed to share with us her draft essay on Vladimir Putin and masculinity. I do not want you to include your thoughts on this draft in the forum response you post online by Tuesday morning (except to the extent that you draw on Elizabeth’s work to respond to question 1 above), but please come to class with a few comments and questions that will help the author as she continues her work on this provocative essay.
Partial Bibliography
Wood, Elizabeth. The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Indiana University Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780253214300.
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. Vintage Books, 1991. ISBN: 9780679733768.
Bray, Francesca. Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China. University of California Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780520208612.
Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. Women’s Work: the First 20,000 Years. W. W. Norton, 1994. ISBN: 9780393313482.
Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. Columbia University Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780231118576.
Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Harvard University Press, 1992. ISBN: 9780674543553.
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780521695442.
Clark, Anna. The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class. University of California Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780520208834.
Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850. Routledge, 2003. ISBN: 9780415290654.
Crowston, Clare Haru. Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675-1791. Duke University Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780822326663.
Goodman, Dena. Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters. Cornell University Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780801475450.
Roberts, Mary Louise. Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927. University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780226721224.
Wildenthal, Lora. German Women for Empire, 1884-1945. Duke University Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780822328193.
