AMERSTD 183E
1 Units
The Woman's Frontier
Catalog Course Description
Westward expansion and the frontier experience have long assumed a mythical status as formative events in the annals of American culture, providing Americans with a collective cultural history and space for fantasy. Within this story there has been little room for women: westward expansion has been encoded as a male activity, and the American West has served a proving ground for the definition of American manhood. However, recent research on frontier women's history has shown that white and non-white women were present on all frontiers and in all phases of American expansion to the West. Moreover, white, literate women wrote copiously in, on, and about western frontiers--in letters and diaries, travel and settlement narratives, reminiscences and autobiographies, poems, stories, and novels. Reading from a diversity of women's texts, we will explore gender together with race and class in order to understand the women's frontier. This course will roughly follow a chronological line from the 1830s into the first decades of the 20th century.
Summer Term
10 hours of Outside Work Hours per week and 5 hours of Instructor presentation of course materials per week.